The Hypothetical Mandarin

The Hypothetical Mandarin
Modernist Literature & Culture

Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions
Elizabeth Outka
Machine-Age Comedy
Michael North

Eric Hayot
The Art of Scandal
Sean Latham
The
Hypothetical
Mandarin
Sympathy, Modernity, and
Chinese Pain
Eric Hayot
1
2009
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hayot, Eric, 1972–
The hypothetical mandarin : sympathy, modernity, and Chinese pain / Eric Hayot.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537796-5; 978-0-19-538249-5 (pbk.)
1. Europe—Civilization—Chinese influences. 2. China—In literature. 3. Sympathy—
Moral and ethical aspects—History. I. Title.
CB203.H39 2009
940—dc22 2008041918
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
Words do the best they can, how they can. To respect them is to behold their
noematic, vigilant arrangement of life and death, so different from the photo-
graph’s, in its own way just as curious and obscene. But prose’s long exposures
seep relentlessly, against the grain of memory, into the forgotten and the uncon-
scious, and are encoded there against the promise of future reactivations. Each
reactivation in turn recalls memory’s unhurried rush toward oblivion.
Likewise, in the doubled frame of memory and forgetting, the help that made
this particular act of writing possible, translating animation into animation, and
into this text’s body. So that:
I wish to thank my family for their love and support.
The conception of this book owes a great deal to Judith Green, who invited me
to give the talk that became its major idea. I wrote The Hypothetical Mandarin’s
first outline in Tucson, where countless hours spent with Charlie Bertsch and Greg
Jackson taught me lessons in friendship and intellectual life. I gained much, while
at the University of Arizona, from a group of tremendous students (Christine,
Baumgarthuber Sean Cobb, Matt Cook, Amanda Gradisek, Megan Massino, Sally
Northmore, Sarah Osment, Helena Ribeiro, Sam Schwartz, Jack Skeffington, Mark
Sussman, and Julie Ward), and from colleagues (Susan Aiken, Ed Dryden, Bill
Epstein, Larry Evers, Stephanie Pearmain, and Susan White). Some of the research
for chapter three was supported by a Career Development Grant awarded by the
University of Arizona’s College of Humanities, which gave me time to travel to the
Wason Collection on East Asia at Cornell University’s Kroch Library.
Most of the manuscript was written in Los Angeles, where for two years I was
supported by a Global Fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles’s
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
International Institute, in a program whose director, Françoise Lionnet, serves the

profession as an exemplar of sustained, generous mentorship. I am grateful to my
fellow fellows, especially Nitsan Chorev, Liz DeLoughrey, Nate Jensen, Smitha
Radhakrishnan, Nina Sylvanus, Jeff Timmons, and Yiman Wang, to German
Esparza and Takamasa Imai, and to Ron Rogowski, who made the International
Institute such a rewarding place to write and think. In and around UCLA, I also
benefited from conversations with Ali Behdad, Michael Heim, Neetu Khanna,
Chris Looby, Jessica Pressman, Marcia Reed (of the Getty Institute), David
Schaberg, Michael Szalay, Shu-mei Shih, and John Williams, all of whom gener-
ously read or responded to parts of the manuscript. Among friends in and around
Los Angeles I am especially grateful to Michelle Clayton, Paul Gilmore, Mark
Goble, Yogita Goyal, Eleanor Kaufman, Mark McGurl, Sianne Ngai, Sharon
Oster, Elisa Tamarkin, and Julie Townsend; together they made those two years
the most intense and exciting experience of intellectual and personal friendship
I’ve had so far. Research for chapter two was supported by a Mellon Foundation
grant from The Huntington Library, where Meredith Berbee, Juan Gomez, and
Kate Henningsen provided invaluable assistance. With funding from the Interna-
tional Institute, I made several visits to the Medical Historical Library at Yale
University, where Toby Appel guided me through the labyrinths of the Peter
Parker collection.
The manuscript was revised, edited, and otherwise polished in State College,
Pennsylvania, which my colleagues Gabeba Baderoon, Tom Beebee, Hester Blum,
Chris Castiglia, Liana Chen, Jon Eburne, Michael Elavsky, Carey Eckhardt,
Charlotte Eubanks, Alexander Huang, Djelal Kadir, Brian Lennon, Sophia
McClennen, Henry Morello, Daniel Purdy, Chris Reed, Amit Schejter, Rachel
Teukolsky, and Reiko Tachibana make such an exciting, interesting place to be.
I am grateful to my research assistants, Bunny Torrey and Grace Wu, and to the
administrative staff of Penn State’s Department of Comparative Literature, in-
cluding Cindy Bierly, JoElle DeVinney, Phyllis Favorite, Irene Grassi, Sharon
Laskowsky, Mona Muzzio, Bonnie Rossman, and Lynn Setzler, for their support.
Audiences at UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies, Cambridge University,
University of California at Berkeley, Arizona, Yale, University of Wisconsin,
Tsinghua University, University of California at Irvine, University of Pennsylva-
nia, Princeton University, and three meetings of the American Comparative
Literature Association gave me incisive and invariably helpful hearings. I have
been lucky to have had conversations with and received advice from Emily Apter,
Bill Brown, David Damrosch, Rey Chow, Susan Stanford Friedman, Robert Kern,
and Lydia Liu, and a long friendship with Jane Gallop. Jennifer Lee, David Eng,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
Lindsay Waters, Josephine Park, Soo La Kim, Carlos Rojas, Wai Chee Dimock,
Paul St. Amour, Eileen Chow, and Jing Tsu all helped clarify and expand my
thinking, as did Ted Wesp and Kelly Klingensmith. My editor at Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Shannon McLachlan, was the Hüsker Dü to this project’s Minneapolis.
I am thankful to her assistants Chrissy Gibson and Brendan O’Neill, and to series
editors Kevin Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger, these latter for seeing how this
project might fit within the optic of their series and for showing me how to see
that as well.
I want to acknowledge, finally, the people who constitute the first concentric
circle of my address: Timothy Billings, Christopher Bush, Pericles Lewis, Colleen
Lye, Haun Saussy, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Steven Yao. Our collective catalog of
expenditure and exchange operates at the limit of reciprocal economy, and from
there works its slow magic on my life. I dedicate this book to Chris, my most
intense interlocutor, the one whose prose, whose conversation, and whose friend-
ship most intensely continue to teach me how to be the person I am trying to
become.
A version of chapter 3 appeared in Representations 99 (summer 2007) as “Chinese

Bodies, Chinese Futures”; a version of chapter 5 appeared in Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture 18:1 (2006). I am grateful for the permission to reprint that
material here.
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Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword xi
Introduction: The Hypothetical Mandarin 3

1. Anecdotal Theory: Edmund Scott, Exact Discourse (1606);
Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (1990) 36
2. The Compassion Trade: Punishment, Costume,
Sympathy, 1800–1801 60
3. The Chinese Body in Pain: American Missionary
Medical Care, 1838–1852 95
4. Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures: The “Coolie” in Late
Nineteenth-Century America 135
5. Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes; or, Modernism’s Double Vision 172
6. Ideologies of the Anesthetic: Acupuncture, Photography, and
the Material Image 207
7. Closures: Three Examples in Search of a Conclusion 246
Index 273
Series Editors’ Foreword
With Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese
Pain, the Modernist Literature & Culture series for the first time steps noticeably
outside of its “comfort zone”—even, one might argue, eschews its stated goal of
exploring the cultural bearings of literary modernism. To such a charge, we can
only plead “guilty”: a book as wide-ranging and thoughtful, as well as thought-
provoking, as The Hypothetical Mandarin is bound to unsettle comfortable
visions of period, field, nation, and method, making the series’ founding logic
somewhat strange to itself. For Hayot takes as his object of inquiry not modern-
ism per se, but the Western project of modernity writ large—and yet zeroes in,
with uncanny precision, on one of its most persistent and disturbing topoi: the
figure of the suffering Chinese subject, and its relationship to two hundred years’
worth of Western discourse about human sympathy and human rights.
The book opens—in its very first sentence—with reference to Adam Smith’s
Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1790), which includes a excursus Hayot calls “a
remarkable thought experiment” (and from which he derives his title). It’s an apt
description of this text, as well: experimental in method and form, bold and risk-
taking, conveying all the excitement of an essai, a trial: a tenacious tracking
of cultural traces according to their own sinuous logic, a trail that leads inexora-
bly back, across two centuries, to that hypothetical, unseen, suffering Chinese
stranger. In this sense, Hayot’s is a postmodern investigation of a constituent
aspect of our modernity; as Jean-François Lyotard suggests in his evocation-cum-
description of “the postmodern” writer, “the text he writes, the work he produces
are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be
judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to
xii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is
looking for.”1
Amongst other things, The Hypothetical Mandarin is a reflection on the status
of the example and the anecdote in contemporary literary and cultural theory,
especially in light of the prominence they have been given in New Historicism
and cultural studies. The persistent way in which Chinese “examples” turn up in
over two hundred years of Western efforts to articulate a discourse of critical
distance and human sympathy—“the sustained and persistent appearance of the
Chinese under the sign of sympathy, and of sympathy under the sign of the
Chinese”—begins, in Hayot’s analysis, to look rather suspect, and rightly changes
the very way in which he understands and deploys the “example” in his own
critical narrative (most evident, perhaps, in the book’s closing pages, in which
three different examples would seem to present three equally plausible attempts
at closure). Examples, one might say, always point in two directions: shoring up
the writer’s argument, yes, but inevitably unmasking the ideological motivation
of that argument at the very same time. Hayot’s, then, is a symptomatic under-
standing of the example.
And yet within this broad and compelling historical and theoretical inquiry,
Hayot also makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations in mod-
ernist studies about center and margins, cosmopolitan metropole and provincial
town: about whether, at this stage in modernist studies’ growth as a discipline, it
is still possible to displace the reigning, even unconscious, paradigm of Anglo-
American modernism from a new modernist studies that palpably desires to
globalize itself. For scholars of modernism, then, Hayot’s most important contri-
bution may be his call to globalize the field more thoroughly: to develop a
nuanced historical, geographic, and linguistic model of modernism that doesn’t
simply decenter a putative London-New York axis, but troubles the very notion of
centrality. This Hayot does by importing from astronomy the diagnostic notion
of the “ecliptic”—“the universal,” Hayot defines it at one point, “construed in
relation to a false sense of centrality.”
If the structure or logic of this move looks deconstructive, it is—as is Hayot’s
refusal to substitute, in any simplistic way, China for Great Britain or the United
States as the more adequate center of a properly understood transnational
modernism. But it is not the older, linguistically self-absorbed version of decon-
1
“Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
U. Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.
SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD xiii
structive thinking from the 1970s and 80s. Ultimately, Hayot asks us to under-
stand sympathy as both deeply human and as a culturally determined, linguistic
construction, arguing that “sustained attention to the making of sympathy”
might help to “undermine the normalizing assumptions about its naturalness
that make it so hard to imagine why someone else doesn’t feel about suffering the
way you do.” Hayot suggests a picture of Anglo-American modernism with its
Chinese “other” always already lodged deep, even preconsciously and prelogically,
within: “What effect does the use of China as an instrument of measure,” he forces
us to ask, “have on what it serves to measure?”
The Hypothetical Mandarin thus moves an implicitly Anglo-American
model of modernism from the center of Modernist Literature & Culture by
interrogating the very logic of the series itself; if the series is able to survive the
challenge this book represents, it will be the better for it. And either way, we’ll be
in Eric Hayot’s debt.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger

Introduction
1. The Mandarin (First Appearance)
In the substantially revised and expanded sixth edition of The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, published shortly before his death in 1790, Adam Smith added a
remarkable thought experiment to his discussion on “the influence and Authority
of Conscience.” The experiment had to do with the effects of physical distance on
moral judgment. Having suggested that any moral adjudication between two
parties must proceed as though it were made “from the place and with the eyes of
a third person,” who could judge impartially between them, Smith went on to
remark how infrequently such judgments actually appear in practice.1 If the
“great empire of China” were suddenly destroyed by an earthquake, for instance,
how would an average European react to the news? Though he might, in the
initial shock, “make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of
1
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis,
1984), 135. Further references in the text are cited as MS. Raphael and Macfie note that though Adam Smith
wrote the following passage in 1760, it did not appear in print until the 1790 edition; they also suggest that
his choice of an earthquake owes something to the famous earthquake of 1755, which killed as many as
ninety thousand people and destroyed the city of Lisbon (see 134na, 136nj and 141nx for more extensive
bibliographic information). The entire section “Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience” appeared
only for the first time in the second edition of 1760, which substantially revised the text of the first 1759
edition. Smith’s book remained more or less unchanged until its sixth edition, printed in 1790.
3
4 THE HYPOTHETICAL MANDARIN
human life,” or in a soberer moment consider “the effects which this disaster
might produce upon the commerce of Europe,” he would eventually return to his
normal life “with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had
happened” (MS, 136). Out of sight, out of mind; the death of distant millions
would in the long run fail to register its fated and objectively terrifying imprint on
his conscience. But consider, Smith writes, that
the most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a
more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he
would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore
with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his
brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an
object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To
prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of
humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his
brethren, provided he had never seen them? (MS, 136–37)
With this last hypothetical question, which pits the value of the lives of
millions of Chinese against the loss of an individual finger, Smith formulates
for the first time a philosophical conjecture that has remained, in a variety of
derivative forms, a crucial figure of European thought over the last two centuries:
What is the relative worth to you of harm done to a Chinese stranger?
The hypothetical’s classic formulation appears in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835),
in a conversation between Rastignac and Bianchon:
“Have you read Rousseau?”

“Yes.”
“Do you remember the passage where he asks the reader what he would
do if he could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin in China by simply
exerting his will, without stirring from Paris?”
“Yes.”
“Well?’
“Bah! I'm at my thirty-third mandarin.”
“Don't play the fool. Look here, if it were proved to you that the thing
was possible and you only needed to nod your head, would you do it?”
“Is your mandarin well-stricken in years? But, bless you, young or old,
paralytic or healthy, upon my word—The devil take it! Well, no.”2
2
Balzac, Le Père Goriot, in Oeuvres Complètes, Scènes de la vie privée VI (Paris, 1949), 361.
INTRODUCTION 5
By the end of the nineteenth century, this passage in Balzac was well enough
known to generate entries under “tuer le mandarin” (to kill the mandarin) in the
Littré dictionary of 1874, defined as “to commit an evil action in the hope that it
will remain unknown”; the phrase also appeared in the eighth edition of the
dictionary of the Académie Française (1932–35), as an idiom for “killing, with
certain impunity, a complete stranger in the expectation of some advantage.” In
the intervening years, it has become a staple figure of the philosophical problem
of moral distance, holding pride of place, for instance, in Carlo Ginzburg’s essay,
“To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Implications of Moral Distance,” which puts it
in a historical trajectory that ranges from Aristotle to David Hume, from Smith
and Balzac to Walter Benjamin, and opens up the history of the putatively
“natural” feeling of human sympathy by showing how philosophical articulations
of compassion’s necessities have shaped, and drawn on, the eras to which they
belong. Along the way Ginzburg points out that the passage Balzac refers to never
actually appears in Rousseau.3
How does spatial distance affect one’s moral responsibility to others? Is it
worse to allow a stranger to starve on your doorstep than to allow one to starve
halfway across the world? How, historically, have societies drawn the line between
the doorstep and the world, teaching their inhabitants where moral responsibility
ends and indifference begins? And why, finally, did Balzac’s misremembered story
of a mandarin become a figure for these philosophical problems, which are at the
3
A version of the passage can be found in François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du
Christianisme (1802), where it takes this form: “If, merely by wishing it, you could kill a man in
China and inherit his fortune in Europe, being assured by supernatural means that the deed would
remain forever unknown, would you allow yourself to form that project?” (Carlo Ginzburg, “To Kill a
Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance,” in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance,
trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper [New York, 2001], 164.). Ginzburg suggests that Chateaubriand’s
story draws from an episode in the work of Denis Diderot dating from 1773, in which a European
murderer “transported to the coast of China” is too far from his crime to feel its sting on his conscience
(165). But there may be a simpler explanation, as Smith’s version predates Chateaubriand’s by twelve
years in print. Given that Chateaubriand began writing Le Génie while in England in 1799, his source
for the hypothetical’s basic structure may have been Smith rather than Diderot. Chateaubriand’s
passage is discussed by Paul Ronai, “Tuer le Mandarin,” Revue de littérature comparée 10 (1930), 520–23.
The mandarin hypothetical appears in a variety of literary sources over the years; for a listing of mostly
European sources see Laurence W. Keates, “Mysterious Miraculous Mandarin: Origins, Literary
Paternity, Implication in Ethics,” Revue de littérature comparée 40.4 (1966), 497–525. As for why Balzac
might have misremembered Chateaubriand as Rousseau (or indeed intentionally confounded them),
Haun Saussy suggests to me that the “general will” Rousseau theorized, of which the neo-royalist
Balzac would have been deeply suspicious, might have been perceived by the latter to operate with the
same implacable randomness and violence that characterizes Bianchon’s hypothetical murder.
heart of the sympathetic transformation of human life that founded modernity’s

dream of a universal subject?
Let us begin by locating Balzac’s hypothetical, along with Smith’s example of
the Chinese earthquake, within that humanitarian transformation, which since
its inauguration in the sympathetic revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries has gone on to remake the social, cultural, and political faces of Western
life.4 Drawing on religious and philosophical doctrines that would have been
nearly incomprehensible to their historical forbears, Europeans and Americans in
that period dramatically expanded the human and geopolitical space toward
which the average member of their societies was presumed to be emotionally
responsible, and toward which both the individual and the state were supposed to
direct their attention and care.5 By the middle of the nineteenth century, sympa-
thy, and the moral responsibility that abetted it, found itself engaged in social
reform movements designed—at least in their public, self-conscious discourse—
to establish affective and material relationships with a wide variety of living
beings, including the poor, the mentally ill, prisoners, slaves, foreigners, and
even animals, whose troubles had not been the subject of serious institutional
or personal concern only a century or two earlier.6 This groundswell of humanist
4
See for instance Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism
(Berkeley, 1992); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1992); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and
Democracy in the American Novel (New York, 1997); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance
Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, N.C., 2005); Benjamin Daffron, Romantic
Doubles: Sex and Sympathy in British Gothic Literature, 1790–1830 (New York, 2002); Joseph Fichtelberg,
Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780-1870 (Athens, 2003); Mary Lenard, Preaching
Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (New York, 1999); Dana D. Nelson, The
World in Black and White: Reading “Race” In American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York, 1993); and
Gonzalo Sánchez, Pity in Fin-de-siècle French Culture: “Liberté, Égalité, Pitié” (Westport, 2004).
5
On the incompatibility of doctrines of sympathy with earlier models, see R.S. Crane, “Sugges-
tions towards a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’” ELH 1.3 (Dec. 1934), 206–07.
6
On slavery, see Thomas Bender and Baucom; on the mentally ill, see Michel Foucault, The Birth
of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1973) and
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York,
1965); on torture, see Edward Peters, Torture (London, 1985); on prison reform see Norval Morris and
David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society
(New York, 1995) and John B. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind
in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1997). On animals, see James Turner, who writes that
Europe’s “flood of sympathy, embracing all people, could hardly fail to overflow its original bounds
and brush with pity the sufferings of other sentient beings. Particularly at a time when scientific
discoveries suggested a closer kinship between men and beasts … animals began to benefit from this
exuberance of compassion” (Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian
Mind [Baltimore, 1980], 7.).
INTRODUCTION 7
reform, an “immense cultural revolution” involving what Charles Taylor has

called “the affirmation of ordinary life,” borrowed its philosophical justifications
from thinkers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Smith, and took its
religious ones from liberal Anglicanism, whose preachers urged parishioners to
visit the sick, care for the poor, and to experience the “‘pleasing Anguish, that
sweetly melts the Mind, and terminates in a Self-approving Joy’ which is the chief
earthly reward of persons who indulge their naturally good inclinations” toward
benevolence.7 It found literary expression in the great eighteenth-century novels
of sensibility, which praised “a generous heart” and a “capacity for refined
feeling,” encouraging moral growth in those new bourgeois subjects to whom
appeals for compassionate reform were so frequently addressed—effectively
schooling generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen in the observation of
sympathetic scenes and the performance of the emotions appropriate to them.8
By 1811 this earnest moral education had become common enough for Jane
Austen to critique the fad in the name of a more down-to-earth “sense.” And
when, sixty years after Austen, Gustave Flaubert lampooned with his usual clear-
eyed cruelty Frédéric Moreau’s romanesque fantasies in L’Éducation Sentimentale,
he only confirmed the nearly universal approbation conferred on the self-
consciously progressive, humanitarian spirit that defined his era.
7
Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights,” in The East Asian
Challenge for Human Rights, Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds. (Cambridge, 1999). The second
citation is from Crane, who is quoting the Scottish moralist David Fordyce, writing in 1754 (227).
A great deal of work has been done to debunk the notion that the rise in compassion resulted from the
general moral improvement of humankind; on this subject see especially Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism
and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” parts 1 and 2, in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and
Abolitionism, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, 1992). For philosophy, see David Hume, Treatise of Human
Nature (New York, 1978) and Francis Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and
Affections (Gainesville, 1969); see Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006), for an essay
describing Hutcheson and Hume’s influence on Smith’s theory of sympathy. On liberal Anglicanism,
see Gerald Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought within
the Church of England, 1660 to 1700 (Cambridge, 1966).
8
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, 1986), 8. Todd identifies sentimental litera-
ture’s heyday as the period from 1740 to 1770, tracing its decline through adjectives applied to the term
“sensibility” (see 7–8). She writes that Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments was the “end to a line of
British moral philosophy” that admitted “the sentimental aim of trying systematically to link morality
and emotion” (27). The long-term implications of this sentimental education, though no longer
explicitly articulated in philosophical terms, continued to operate through the humanitarianism that
bears their dreams into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the literature of sensibility, see also
Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800 (New York,
1994).
2. The Chinese Ecliptic
From inside the phenomenological framing provided by the great cultural and
narrative project that remade the emotional life of ordinary Europeans and
Americans, a narrative hypothetical in which one resisted the temptation to
murder a Chinese mandarin established itself as a generic philosopheme for the
question of how best to be, or to become, a modern, sympathetic human being. It
is the opening premise of this book that China’s appearance inside the two-
centuries long discourse on the relation between sympathy and humanity makes a
difference to the history of Western thought—though what kind of difference,
exactly, remains to be determined. It follows from this premise that no history of
modernity will be complete if it cannot account for the habit of this reference, for
the sustained and persistent appearance of the Chinese under the sign of sympa-
thy, and of sympathy under the sign of the Chinese. Its historical expressions,
mechanisms, and topographies unfold like so many accordions in the pages that
follow, illuminating there the specific outlines of the difference they make.
The particular analysis of China’s place in the history of sympathy and
suffering will be shaped by a more general sense of the role China has tended
to play in Western history and thought. There, “China” has been most consis-
tently characterized as a limit or potential limit, a horizon neither of otherness
nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and
similarity, and thus, because what is at stake in the era of modernity in the
West is the dream of the universalization of culture, as a horizon of the very idea
of horizons, a horizon, that is, that marks the limit of the universal as a
transcendental field. “China” has been, in short, not just one name for the line
that delimits inside from outside, one form of the concept of totality, but rather a
form of all forms of totality, a figure against which other forms of totality have
been measured. This is true insofar as “China” has fulfilled a generic ideal of the
ethnic other, particularly of that type of other known as the Oriental.9 But it is
also particularly true of China, whose longstanding status as the place one gets to
9
Whose history became visible so clearly for the first time in Edward Said’s Orientalism (New
York, 1979), and whose analysis has been extended by so many others since then. As an instance of a
case in which Chineseness seems interchangeable with a generic barbarism of the other (which may
not even be “Oriental”), consider that the painful twisting of the skin on the forearm, known in the
United Kingdom as a “Chinese burn,” is called an “Indian burn” in the United States. In either case, the
association with a particularly inventive small cruelty is associated with an “other,” but it clearly does
not matter much which one; or rather, the other chosen depends on local historical factors and not on
the perpetual stability of a stereotype.
INTRODUCTION 9
by digging through the center of the earth reflects the ways in which Chinese
otherness differs from a generic Oriental otherness under whose aegis it some-
times appears.
China’s unique mythology in Western history is the product of two major
historical facts: first, that modern Europe encounters China as the first contem-
poraneous civilizational other it knows, and not as a “tribe” or nation whose
comparative lack of culture, technology, or economic development mitigated the
ideological threat it posed to progressivist, Eurocentric models of world history.
China’s status as an actively competing civilizational model stands in stark
contrast to the modern European encounters with, say, the civilizations of ancient
Egypt (long gone), the Indian subcontinent (colonizable), the Ottoman Turks
(declining), or the Aztec empire (destroyed). Though each of these was absorbed
as a historical and ideological force into the European generation of its self-image,
and differently each time, it would be a mistake to fold the Chinese example
entirely into a generically postcolonial one with which it has much in common.
Second, for much of the period that modern Europe has known China—
especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the latter had significant
economic and technological advantages over Europe in the manufacture of
certain especially desirable goods, most notably tea, silk, and porcelain, whose
exchange dominated, financially and figurally, the maritime economies of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This importance has not widely been re-
cognized in the fields of literary and cultural studies, at least partly because these
fields have not tended to address questions of political economy. Thus it takes an
economic historian, Kenneth Pomeranz, to assert that it is “China, more than any
other place, that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself,
from Smith and Malthus to Marx and Weber,” a claim whose truth-value interests
me less than the fact that such a thing would be impossible to say in literary
studies, my native field.10
The features that made China such a challenge to the European idea of
modernity have tended to be erased by the historical and sociological accounts
of China written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sense of that
empire as a historically immobile, stagnating, underdeveloped and despotic space
10
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 25 (emphasis mine). Chinese advantages in industrial manufacture
led to what can only be called from our present perspective “industrial espionage”; for a particularly
compelling reading of the work of Daniel Defoe as a figure for what one might call Europe’s “industrial
desire,” see Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25.4 (Summer 1999).
developed by thinkers like Smith, Hegel, or Marx has only in the economic
histories of recent years been seriously challenged, and the implications of
those challenges for the notions of historical development that follow from the
work of these important thinkers have yet to be fully elaborated. The dismissal of
Chinese legitimacy, and the forgetting of its massive impact on the European
economy and imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is at least
partly an effect of the dramatic rise of European economic power, whose growth
line crosses that of China somewhere around 1815, when Europe took the lead that
came to subtend the modern world system.11 (As we will see, however, a general
anxiety about the sheer numbers of Chinese people and, indeed, an ongoing
tendency to see China as an immanent horizon of the capitalist market, persisted
well through the nineteenth century and beyond.)
The combination of these historical facts gives China and the idea of China a
unique, if hardly paradigmatic, place in the record of European historiography and
economic thought, not to mention in the forms of literature and culture that
operated under the umbrellas of European-driven imperialism and economic
globalization. Here one might note that the absence of China from the field of
postcolonial studies feels like the symptomatic expression of its strange relationship
to contemporary scholarship on the relation between the West and its others. Partly
this absence has to do with the fact that China was never quite colonized, of course,
but the fact of not having been colonized, rather than being understood as a crucial
event in the history of colonialism, has instead become the implicit justification for
China’s exclusion from the postcolonial field. As though the failure to belong to a
model were not in and of itself an important expression of logic of the model. It is
precisely by virtue of being on the margins of the postcolonial that China can
contribute to the historical and theoretical work in the field.12
I begin, then, by noting that China’s function as a horizon of horizons stems
directly from its “civilizational”—that is to say, its cultural, economic, and
technological—challenge to Europe, and from the historical and material
11
The date comes from Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley, 1998), 283.
12
On this same subject, some fifteen years ago, Rey Chow, arguing that the question should be
“how, in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [East Asia] remained ‘territorially independent,’ it
offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works—i.e., how imperialism as ideological
domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the
land” (Writing Diaspora: Tactical Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies [Bloomington, 1993],
7–8).
INTRODUCTION 11
relations that have brought the two in contact with one another (and, at times,
kept them from each other).
In what follows, I will occasionally call this function “ecliptical” or “ecliptic,”
using a term borrowed from the field of astronomy to refer to the larger relational
structure and history I have described so far. The ecliptic is the path of the sun
seen from the surface of the Earth. For most of human history it was a measure of
astronomical space and worldly time; in the ecliptick, as Geoffrey Chaucer wrote
in 1391, “is the longitude of a celestiall body rekned, evene fro the heved of Aries
unto the ende of Pisces,” from, that is, one spring equinox to the next, yonge sonne
to dissipated one.13 The ecliptic was essentially the measure of the universe as
clock, a frame for the metronomic motions that guided astrological predictions,
the science of astronomy through Copernicus, mythological narratives, and the
rhythms of agricultural life. The later revelation that the path of the sun seen from
the surface of the Earth is not the path of the sun, but (a) an artifact of the Earth’s
own path around the sun, and (b) therefore simply a path of the sun seen from a
certain perspective, has not cured ordinary life of ecliptic language, which tends
still to refer the sun as “high” or “low” in the sky.
The ecliptic thus names a particular kind of relationship between the local and
the universal: the universal as it is imagined from a particular perspective, one
whose locality is named and defined by the universal it declares. As far as the
actual ecliptic goes, its “universal” figure, namely the sun, was as universal a
figure as it was possible to think in the chasm between Ptolemy and Copernicus,
when the solar system was the only universe anyone knew, and the night sky’s
stars realms for the gods to play in. Its perspectival relation was therefore
universalizing (its perspective quite literally the perspective of the entire planet)
and localizing (from other planets or other solar systems our sun follows an
entirely different path across the local sky) all at once. It was a figure for the
virtually universal, the virtually local—the universal construed in relation to a
false sense of centrality rather than the universal as such. From the perspective of
this book, this history makes the ecliptic an especially useful figure for the
relation between “China” and “the West”: it is a figure of the relation between
two things rather than a sign for one or the other of them; it is the figure, I repeat,
of a relation, and not of the things related. Much of this book will be concerned
with tracing the history of that relation, recognizing the ways in which a Western
13
“And his latitude is rekned after the quantite of his declynacioun north or south toward the
polys of this world,” Chaucer added in his Treatise on the Astrolabe (originally ca. 1391–92; Norman,
2002).
perspective oriented around China helps establish the centrality of the West to the
history it writes, even as it writes—with its other “hand,” as it were—a more local
history of the geopolitically limited landmass it calls “China.”
I discuss the ecliptic idea along two major lines of advance. First, the book
reads the consistent appearance of the Chinese example in relation to the general
development of the idea of the modern human being, attending particularly to
the ways in which the seemingly arbitrary choice of China shapes the thought that
underlies it, and the ways in which the ecliptic relation between China and the
West helps the West understand itself as a civilization and as modern (just as
people on Earth have imagined the being and significance of the Earth in relation
to the presence of a single, “rotating” sun). How does the cultural baggage that
comes along with the Chinese example shape or articulate the history of the
human to which it belongs? What effect does the use of China as an instrument of
measure have on what it serves to measure? And how does this rhetorical,
philosophical figure—never independent from China’s position in global history,
its relations to trade or emigration, to imperialism, to globalization—modify
some imaginary and fully neutral theory of the human that would never have
required the Chinese example, or even used it? In what sense, that is, is the
conception of the modern sympathetic human being that the West represents to
itself in some sense already—from the very beginning—“Chinese,” and what
would it mean for it to be so? These questions, which bear immediately on the
historical and philosophical value of the examples this book discusses, also raise
the more general problem of the relation between the example and its illustrated
rule, the “for instance” and the principle it sustains; here The Hypothetical
Mandarin will engage, though at some remove, the ongoing attempt to think
the tension between the supplemental and the necessary, the transient and the
exigent, as they operate in action and in thought. More on this in a moment.
The second line of advance reverses the frame of this initial orientation,
abandoning China’s influence on the history of sympathy to attend to the latter’s
effects upon the history of the Western experience of China.14 It thus flips the
14
Against whatever initial revulsion will refuse, seeing the braided pair under the microscope
here, to acknowledge that they are objects of the same order—that persists in believing that sympathy
is a word-concept and thus very much subject to this sort of representational history, while “China” is
something else entirely, I will simply say that the difference between sympathy and China along the
axis of reality is of degree not of kind. “China” operates simultaneously as a contested name for an
Asian landmass with a particular national and cultural history, and as a rhetorical-epistemological
figure that refers to the cultural travels of that landmass, neither of these—the landmass or the
INTRODUCTION 13
terms of the ecliptic while remaining focused on its relational structure as such;
instead of showing how this ecliptic relation taught the West about itself, it relates
what it taught the West about China. This generates the following problems: How
does the intertwining of the dual problems of “China” and “sympathy” affect the
place of China in Western history, sociology, medical science, philosophy, and
literature? How does the availability of “China” as a certain kind of representa-
tional figure correspond to and shape its undeniable presence in the world that
represents it, and what kinds of effects does this availability and shaping have on
such things as international diplomacy, the treatment of Chinese immigrants, or
theories of universal history? As it responds to these questions, the book inter-
venes in the larger project of writing the global history of “China,” to which such
scholars as Timothy Billings, Christopher Bush, Rey Chow, Lydia Liu, Colleen
Lye, David Palumbo-Liu, David Porter, Haun Saussy, Shu-mei Shih, and Steven
G. Yao, among many others, have contributed in recent years.
Though The Hypothetical Mandarin concerns itself extensively with represen-
tations of China, the quantity of this attention never suggests that its dismantling
of a Eurocentric conception of European history ought to be replaced by a
sinocentric picture that restores China to its rightful place at the core of a
world history that would be, as in some nationalist or ethnically empowering
imaginary, “proper” to its status as a great civilization. Much of this work will
undermine, not for the first time, the fantasy that there ever existed a pure and
unadulterated “West” that was the source of the civilizational tradition that some
thinkers in the United States and Europe routinely claim for it. But the book will
also propose, obliquely, that such an undermining operates with respect to China
as well (where fantasies of cultural uniqueness and historical time sustained by
the “person” of the Yellow Emperor console the ideological brethren of the
figure—operating independently of one another, but in dialogue, just as someone with a reputation
for bluffing at cards might successfully play a game completely “straight,” deliberately taking advan-
tage of the relation between concept that names her and the fact of being, more or less simply, not
identical with it (this is a case in which the player’s resistance to interpellation is empowering; the
historical record on interpellation is bleaker, as its theorization by Louis Althusser suggests). As in the
case of the poker player, the recursive interactions between “China” as fact and “China” as figure
makes one of the subjects of negotiation the very notion of authenticity that would appear to divide
them from one another, because once the player plays it straight in relation to a prior reputation for
bluffing, any question about whether she is truly a bluffer “at heart” must establish a relationship
between the figural and the factual dimensions of her personality and thus theorize, however
unconsciously, a more general relation between facts and figures. Haun Saussy, Steven Yao, and I
have made this argument at more length, minus the poker example, in the introduction to Sinogra-
phies: Writing China (Minneapolis, 2007).
American neo-conservatives). I do this work, however, not to produce this

undermining effect but because I am trying to understand what is historically
true. That truths occasionally destabilize the self-aggrandizing delusions of patri-
ots is a happy side effect of their pursuit.
3. Empire of Cruelties
For some time now China has been a privileged object of European and American
discourse on cruelty. Its role there as a horizon of horizons is one feature of its
participation in a longer discourse on sympathy and humanism in which it has
only recently taken up a speaking part. Consider for instance the following
sentence, which appeared in the pages of The New Republic a year after the
People’s Republic’s murderous suppression of the student movement in Tianan-
men Square in 1989: “No better proof could be imagined for Nietzsche’s insight
that cruelty is the great festival pleasure of mankind than the torment inflicted by
the Chinese people on one another for the last 400 years.”15 This is by all rights a
fairly astonishing thing to say, given the breadth and import of the historical
claim it makes: no better proof, Andrew Nathan writes, for human pleasure in
cruelty than the Chinese of the last four centuries. And not just no better proof in
actuality, but no better proof anywhere: no better proof could be imagined than
the self-inflicted torment of the Chinese.
The exceptional quality of the Chinese is confirmed, it seems, by the adjective
that precedes “proof ”: “better” becomes, thanks to the “no” that precedes it, an
idiomatic superlative. But this grammatical exceptionalism undoes itself just as it
breaches Chinese shores: by the end of Nathan’s sentence, we learn that the
hyperbolic pleasure in cruelty of the Chinese illustrates Nietzsche’s judgment
on all of “mankind.” Thus are the exceptional Chinese returned to the family of
man, their torment an instance of a more general human rule. A rule to which the
sentence’s Chinese find themselves subjected even as they, in the best imaginable
way, instantiate it: from the outskirts of the human, they assure the reliability of
the category.16
15
Andrew Nathan, China’s Transition (New York, 1997), 15.
16
The connection between Chinese history and cruelty that Nathan outlines is an impolite
version of the claim that there is a special connection between Chinese culture and violence. Note for
instance the parenthetical that follows the opening lines of Stevan Harrell’s introduction to Violence in
China: “Why does a culture that condemns violence, that plays down the glory of military exploits,
INTRODUCTION 15
This is not a new story: the movement whereby the exceptional object,
rejected, excluded, and marginal, comes through its very marginality to provide
the support for the structure from which it has been removed lies at the very core
of philosophy, and its critique belongs to the tradition called “deconstruction.”
Located in a worldly perspective, stated with reference to a combination of
geography and truth, the process through which the particular example guaran-
tees the universal category is precisely what I intend to name with the word
“ecliptic”: the Chinese serving as a measure of the species. But Nathan’s sentence
above is also important because it presents us with the other major feature of the
discursive network that brings together China, sympathy, and the universal
subject of modernity, namely the idea that the Chinese are unusually or especially
cruel. The historian Jonathan Spence identifies the European origins of that
proposition in the middle of the sixteenth century, when he finds a Portuguese
traveler reporting that the Chinese have a remarkable capacity for cruelty.17
awards its highest prestige to literary, rather than martial, figures, and seeks harmony over all other
values, in fact display such frequency and variety of violent behavior, that is, of the use of physical force
against persons? (Whether Chinese culture is more violent than other cultures is difficult to judge, but
it is visibly not less violent than many.)” (Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture, ed.
Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell [Albany, 1990], 1.). What is so strange about this parenthesis is
that it gives what would otherwise be a book on the sources and structures of violence in Chinese
culture—a perfectly reasonable project, if it were the sort of thing people studied in all cultures—the
comparative edge hinted at but unelaborated in the first sentence. The difference between such a
project and something like David Der-wei Wang’s The Monster that is History is that Wang frames the
history of violence in China within a larger philosophical and cultural framework that keeps the
Chinese example from becoming exceptional (The Monster That is History: History, Violence, and
Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China [Berkeley, 2004]).
17
Spence discusses narratives by the sailor Galeote Pereira and the Dominican monk Gaspar da
Cruz in his book, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1988). Pereira, a
soldier and trader, spent four years in Chinese prisons after being caught smuggling goods off the coast
of Fujian in 1549. His account of his treatment is, all things considered, fairly even-handed. But
consider the use made of that same material in da Cruz’s 1569 Treatise, in which the things of China are
related at great length, with their particularities, as likewise of the kingdom of Ormuz, which gives its
chapter on Chinese judicial punishments, whose content is taken almost entirely from the accounts of
Pereira and his fellows, the following subtitle: “this is a notable chapter” (he capitulo notauel). Given
that no other chapter in his account has a subtitle at all, the chapter is indeed “notable,” just as much
for its subtitle as for the way in which it raises the emotional stakes of Pereira’s reports and the critique
of the Chinese far beyond the levels apparent in the earlier narrative. The difference between Pereira
and da Cruz may not be, however, the site of a historical break or rupture beyond which the take on the
Chinese relation to suffering is inevitably negative; it seems, rather, an early example of cultural
intolerance not yet fully hooked into, as are the texts I examine in this book, the discourse on
sympathy and humanity that so consistently framed discussions of China from the late eighteenth
century onward.
The stereotype has been reinforced over the years in a wide variety of genres and
figures, including illustrated guides to Chinese punishments, photographs of
Chinese executions, sociological accounts of “Chinese characteristics,” Harry
Houdini’s performances of his “Chinese Water Torture” box, cartoonish villains
like Ming the Merciless or the notorious Doctor Fu Manchu, and exposés of the
laogai prison system in the People’s Republic of China, to give only a partial
accounting.18 Its mythology presents us with evidence for the generalized per-
ception of a difference in cultural relationships to sympathy and suffering, the
representation of an abyss above which civilization and barbarism sway in a
precarious balance.
In the countless reproductions of this stereotype, which circulated with only
the barest regard for the reality to which they referred, we witness the West
affirming the phatic and ceaselessly necessary production of its unique difference,
naturalizing the “Chinese” position on cruelty to the point that it could, by the
end of the nineteenth century, be imagined to speak in its own defense. So that in
1899 a Chinese torturer appearing in a French novel could answer “back” to
Europe on cruelty’s behalf, grousing to a European visitor to his bloody workshop
about the damage done by “occidental snobbism that invades us, with its iron-
clads, its rapid-fire canons and long-range rifles, its electricity, its explosives, in
short, everything that makes death collective, administrative, and bureaucratic.”19
The complaint, which appears in the anarchist Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden
(Le Jardin des supplices), suggests that one way for anticapitalist anarchism to
make common cause with a Romantic defense of craft labor against a reformist,
sympathetic era that had outlawed torture, remade the prisons and hospitals,
18
In Death by a Thousand Cuts, Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue note the
long history of Chinese cruelty in the West and remark that especially in the post–1945 period, jokes
about the Chinese affinity for torture allowed the postwar generation to distance themselves from an
allegedly premodern past (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). On Houdini, see Ruth Brandon, The Life and
Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (New York, 1993); on laogai prisons, remark the subtitle of Harry Wu
and George Vescey’s Troublemaker: One Man’s Crusade Against Chinese Cruelty (New York, 1996); on
Fu Manchu and other stereotypes, see Sheng-Mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian
American Identity (Minneapolis, 2000) and Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular
Culture (Philadelphia, 1999). The other examples are discussed at more length in the chapters to come.
19
Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices (Paris, 1957), 187 (translation mine). The torturer goes
on with great pleasure to describe to his guests a torture he’d invented in which a frenzied rat eats its
way into the body of the condemned, before complaining that a panel of judges had denied its use:
“I was bringing them something infinitely glorious . . . a unique example of its type, and capable of
firing the imaginations of our greatest artists . . . but they didn’t want it . . . [ . . . ] These are the
symptoms of our decadence . . . Ah! We are a defeated people, a dead people! The Japanese can
come . . . we can no longer resist them . . . Farewell, China!” (193, translation mine).
INTRODUCTION 17
substituted machine guns for crossbows, and replaced the festival scene of the
public execution with the prospect of total panoptic sovereignty, was to travel
through the realm of the imagination Europe called “China.”20
The justifications for soft imperialism and modernization create histories of
the rectification of cruelty, its socialization and control, and its elimination as a
legitimate form of the expression of state power. As Mirbeau’s torturer suggests,
the bureaucratic modernization of violence and the increased importance of
sympathy reached well beyond the boundaries of Europe, as European colonizers
instituted policies in other countries designed to adjust local norms relating to
violence and suffering, or simply asserted in the field of international diplomacy
the philosophical fact of their sympathetic difference.21 Talal Asad has referred to
this practice as “humanizing the world,” the process whereby a locally particular
relationship to sympathy and suffering universalized itself in the guise of a
civilizing modernity. The elimination in the colonies of “customs the European
rulers considered cruel,” Asad argues, derived from the need “to impose what
they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject popula-
tion—that is, the desire to create new human subjects,” this latter task in the
elevation of barbarians to global citizenship one of the major side projects of the
imperialist adventure. (Allegedly humanitarian efforts were also, sometimes,
genuinely humanitarian in intention or in effect; this is history, not a cartoon,
and its engagement with the fact and the idea of violence is complex.) As Asad
remarks, the forms of sympathy and humanity so allowed did not require the
elimination of all pain (lamentably, civilization so often has to be imposed at
gunpoint) but rather the eradication of those kinds of suffering deemed barbaric
or gratuitous, and the retention of “suffering that was necessary to the process of
20
Let us not pass over in silence, however, the ways torture becomes erotic in both Mirbeau’s
novel and in the period more generally. Karen Haltunnen has explicitly linked the rise of a European
interest in forms of sadomasochistic pornography to rise in humanitarian sensibility of the late
eighteenth century in “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,”
The American Historical Review 100.2 (April 1995). My penultimate clause refers to the well-known
opening to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where the difference between the public drawing and
quartering of Damiens the regicide and the private, reformist incarcerations of a few decades later
marks the shift from the feudal to the modern state (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan [New York, 1979]).
21
Even as, in Europe and the United States, the increasing importance of sympathy led to the
production of “sensationalist” images and narratives in the penny press, as though the disappearance
of torture as a form of state punishment simply forced a reappearance of scenes of torture marked as
illegal. Haltunnen reproduces an 1848 woodcut of “Michael McGarvey beating his wife to death”
whose appeal is as much to voyeuristic pleasure as to sympathetic outrage (313).
realizing one’s humanity—that is, pain that was adequate to its end, not wasteful
pain.”22
Because, as Asad argues, “pain does not simply constitute irrefutable evidence
of the corporeal ground of experience, [but] is also a way of constituting the
epistemological status of the body,” what was at stake in the transformation of
pain and suffering—and what was lost in that transformation, very much in the
sense that Mirbeau articulates it—was one particular use of the body as an
epistemological heuristic, as, that is, a way of knowing the world and a way of
grasping the body’s relation to it.23 Whether the delegitimation of that way of
knowing constitutes a tragedy is not the question here. Important rather is an
understanding of suffering, its recognition and its classification, as epistemologi-
cal processes, as mechanisms for the production of social truth and for the location of
self in relation to world, and thus an awareness of the body’s paradoxical status as
both “mode and object of knowing.”24 When normative assumptions about the
proper relation to sympathy and suffering dominate a cultural discourse as
completely as do the ones that drive the modern discourses on humanity and
human rights, it is easy to lose sight of the cultural and historical production of
those relations, easy to imagine that these universal norms have allowed us finally
to reach the unmediated ground of humanity’s corporeal existence, from which
one might then deduce the laws and habits that ought to govern ordinary life.
Looking at the way that this network of sympathy, suffering, and exchange has
developed returns its cultural project and epistemological implications to the
foreground of thought. This not simply to criticize that project for being partic-
ular, or complicit with imperialism or global capital, as though there were today a
relation to sympathy or suffering that could somehow operate outside the
framework of cultural particularity or the history of imperialism and globaliza-
tion. The point is rather to understand how these mechanisms operate within the
fields of imperialism and globalization, and thence to grasp how their production
through a variety of cultural objects and in a number of different cultural
moments has shaped the thought patterns of the world in which we currently
live. If, as Asad suggests, modernity is first and foremost a “project—or rather, a
22
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), 109, 111.
For an articulation of the way the logic of “necessary pain” appears in decisions made by the
International Monetary Fund, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York,
2003), 119–22.
23
Asad, 92.
24
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collec-
tion (Durham, N.C., 1993), 131.
INTRODUCTION 19
series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve,” then

the stakes of thinking through the form of humanity in whose name that project
has been carried out should have profound implications for the collective and
incorporated futures that we can imagine for the planet and the species.25
Nowhere have these implications been clearer in recent years than in the “Asian
values debate” on human rights. This debate, which represents the “most promi-
nent contemporary attack on what for the last two decades most states and
human rights activists have taken to be authoritative international standards,”
originated in the early 1990s from the leadership of three prominent East Asian
economic success stories—Malaysia, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of
China.26 Despite a general recognition that the initial impetus for the debate
stemmed largely from attempts by authoritarian regimes to justify their
continued rejection of international standards regarding political speech and
legal protections, by the late 1990s it was the case, as Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel
A. Bell write in their introduction to The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights,
that “East Asian” views on human rights were “contributing to a genuine
dialogue that goes to the heart of the debate [on] the meaning of ‘universality’
and the areas of justifiable [cultural and political] difference.”27 The debate has
since drawn in such international organizations as the United Nations, local and
transnational nongovernmental organizations, philosophers, historians, and po-
litical theorists, and grown to encompass discussions on whether temporary
restrictions on civil and political rights can be justified by the need for
the expansion of social and economic ones, on the possibilities of building a
transnational Rawlsian consensus, and on the contributions Confucian values
might make to a new and more fully universal definition of the human being,
particularly one that abandons the weaknesses of Western-style “individual-
ism.”28 The most powerful international expression of the debate’s geopolitical
25
Asad, 13.
26
Jack Donnelly, “Human Rights and Asian Values: A Defense of ‘Western’ Universalism,” in The
East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds. (Cambridge, 1999), 64.
27
Bauer and Bell, 4. Errol Mendes also refers to the debate as “more apparent than real” as he
searches for common ground between East and West (he finds it in Canada), but the fact that he
participates in the debate at all suggests that though it may be unreal in the arena of international
political maneuvering, it is real enough in the realm of political philosophy (“Asian Values and Human
Rights: Letting the Tigers Free,” in Asia Pacific Face-Off, eds. Fen Hampson, Maureen Molot, and
Martin Rudner [Ottawa, 1997], 176.).
28
On Rawls, see Onuma Yasuaki, “Toward an Intercivilizational Approach to Human Rights,” in
Bauer and Bell; on Confucian values, see Joseph Chan, “A Confucian Perspective on Rights for
legitimacy was the 1993 Bangkok Declaration on Human Rights, jointly signed by
the governments of the entire Asian region, which asserted that “while human
rights are universal in nature, they must be considered in the context of a
dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind
the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical,
cultural, and religious backgrounds”—a phrase whose initial “while” opens a
substantial philosophical attack on the universality it goes on to affirm.29 The
declaration’s effects on the concept of human rights today have been extremely
powerful: it has inaugurated the only significant contemporary critique of the
concept of human rights to emerge from an explicitly national or regional
perspective, and it has articulated from that perspective a theory of a universal,
culturally located, and post-Western subject of modernity.30
There exists, I will say right now, surprising no one, no such subject except in
the imagination. But the imaginative possibility of such a subject, the idea that
there is or could be a kind of human or a kind of humanity that would allow us
Contemporary China,” in Bauer and Bell, and Tu Weiming, “Implications of the Rise of ‘Confucian’
East Asia,” Daedalus 129.1 (Winter 2000). Tu in particular picks up on critiques made by former
Singapore Prime Minister (PM) Lee Kuan Yew and former Malaysian PM Mahathir bin Mohamed
about the social problems allegedly produced by Western individualism, writing that a need for a new
theory of “togetherness” is obvious “in light of the danger of social disintegration of all levels, from
family to nation” (179).
29
The Bangkok Declaration was issued in March 1993 as the Asian region’s contribution to the
Second World Conference on Human Rights, which was held in Vienna in June 1993. It is reprinted in
Negotiating Culture and Human Rights, eds. Lynda S. Bell, Andrew J. Nathan, and Ilan Peleg (New York,
2001), and I am citing from its appearance there (394). For a reading of the declaration as far more
coincident with existing universalist notions of human rights than it initially appeared to be, see Michael
Dowdle’s essay in that volume; for more on these “Asian values debates” in general, see also the essays in
Bauer and Bell; Michael C. Davis, ed., Human Rights and Chinese Values: Legal, Philosophical, and Political
Perspectives (Hong Kong, 1995); and Chad Hansen, “Do Human Rights Apply to China? A Normative
Analysis of Cultural Difference,” in Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics, eds.
Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen-fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young (Ann Arbor, 1997).
30
The other major challenge to the concept of universal human rights comes from feminism; see for
instance Robin West’s influential “Jurisprudence and Gender,” which argues that the presumptive human
subject of law is, by virtue of its theorization as physically separate from other such subjects, exclusively
masculine (The University of Chicago Law Review 55.1 [Winter 1988]). Feminist critiques of human rights
also appear within the governmental framework of the United Nations, as in the Fourth World Confer-
ence on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Lynn Hunt’s history of human rights is sensitive to this terrain,
while ignoring the Bangkok Declaration (and indeed the question of cultural difference) entirely
(Inventing Human Rights: A History [New York, 2007]). On the relation between “women” and “Asian
values,” however, see Norani Othman, “Grounding Human Rights Arguments in Non-Western Cultures:
Shari’a and the Citizenship Rights of Women in a Modern Islamic State,” in Bauer and Bell, and Anne-
Marie Hilsdon, ed., Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives (London, 2000).
INTRODUCTION 21
all finally to get along—if everyone would just stop being such assholes—
remains a vital part of contemporary political life at the tactical and philosoph-
ical levels.31 Such a subject, whose invention and articulation would gather all
cultural differences under the umbrella of a universal and “capital-H” Humanity
has until recently been the exclusive dream of the European Enlightenment,
its invention one of the major achievements of the last few centuries which,
having seen the violent and deliberate deaths of human beings in appalling
numbers, finally produced the near-universal adoption of the United Nations’
Declaration of Universal Human Rights in 1948. The construction of a theory of
human being-ness that could and should apply to every single member of the
species relied upon, as Lynn Hunt has recently argued, the concomitant inven-
tion of a new sort of human subject defined by an “imagined empathy” toward
the suffering of others of the type we see developing in Smith and Balzac. From
the historical dawning of this human subject to the present day marks only a
fractional shift in the planet’s geologic time. For the evolved apes subject to the
declarative lightning bolts of 1776, 1789, or 1948, however, the moment has been
defined by ceaseless efforts and ferment, hypocrisies and disappointments, in
the project of thinking the human subject defined by such an empathy, and,
with greater difficulty, that of living up to the promises projected forward by
such a thought.
It may feel like a historical accident that the foremost revisionary challenge
to these European promises in the last two decades comes from precisely that
geographic region whose importance to the development of the concept of the
human it is The Hypothetical Mandarin’s task to demonstrate. But it feels like
less of one if one recognizes that the “Asian values” whose legitimacy is
asserted in the human rights field gain almost all of their rhetorical force
from the economic success of the East Asian countries in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. The structure of the contemporary debate thus reproduces the one
that allowed Europe to export its culture through cultural and military
imperialism over the last few centuries, and not incidentally to place its values
at the center of the 1948 Universal Declaration: the right to assert the potential
31
As should be the case, despite the criticisms leveled at the concept and its pretensions. I follow
Inoue Tatsuo in believing that “sovereignty needs human rights not just as a functional compensation
for what it undermined but also as a positive justification for its emergence,” and thus that in a world
defined by state sovereignty the language of human rights remains crucial to both the rhetoric and
thinking of anyone seeking to abridge or limit that sovereignty in any way (“Liberal Democracy and
Asian Orientalism,” in Bauer and Bell, 30.). As for what might happen if sovereignty as we understand
it disappears, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York, 2004).
universality of one’s cultural values derives almost directly from the perceived
ability of those values to sustain economic development, and thus, given the
history we have, on a relationship to capitalism. (This is why culturalist
arguments against civil and political rights made by third-worldist movements
in the 1960s, or three other recent declarations—the Cairo Declaration of
1990, the Tunis Declaration of 1991, and the San José Declaration of 1993—
did not generate anything like the philosophical response that the Bangkok
Declaration did.) Recognizing the degree to which the legitimacy of any given
piece of state-generated human rights discourse relies on the success of its
economy allows us to see that the entire question of universal rights cannot be
thought outside the process of industrial and postindustrial modernization.32
From that larger perspective the apparent civilizational divide separating the
two behemoths, East and West, facing each other across the Viennese tables of
the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, coalesces into a deeper affinity
produced by the “subtending line of force of global capital” that joins them,
as Pheng Cheah has argued, “against the possibility of other alternatives of
development, feminist or ecological-subalternist.”33
Noting the coincidental development of the concepts of human rights with the
dramatic historical increase in the range and power of capital, Cheah goes on to
remark that the concept of the “human” grounding rights talk takes as its most
fundamental value the inexchangeability of the human being. This inexchange-
ability—a resistance to commodification that allows the human being to retain a
fundamental (or “inalienable”) separation from the circulation of capital—was
framed by Immanuel Kant in his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals as
a question of the difference between price and dignity: “What is related to general
inclinations and needs has a market price [Marktpreis],” he noted, “but that which
constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has
not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth [einen innern
32
Which explains why the debate faltered at the geopolitical level following the 1997 Asian
financial crisis. For a longer discussion of the relation between the economics of international trade
and the history of human rights, see Susan Koshy, “From Cold War to Trade War: Neocolonialism and
Human Rights,” Social Text 58 (Spring 1999).
33
Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge,
2007), 148–49; further references in the text are cited as IC. Let us remark one crucial feature of the
“Asian values debate” that retains the East/West divide even under the guise of a mutual recognition: it
consistently opposes Asian values to Western philosophy. Such a structure picks up (probably inadver-
tently) on the zhong xue wei ti, xi xue wei yong (Chinese learning for essential things [ti], Western
learning for practical matters [yong]) formula adopted by Chinese modernizers in the early twentieth
century, though its repetition in this case seems as much tragedy as farce.
INTRODUCTION 23
Wert], that is, dignity” (IC, 155).34 For Cheah the presence of the discourse of the
market at the core of the theorization of the universal subject of modernity
suggests that the entire notion of human rights is caught up from the beginning
in the market to which it is so often rhetorically opposed. The history of human
rights, in which the human being’s inalienable distance from the process of
exchange functions as the counterweight to the ever-broadening commodifica-
tion of human life, is in such a conception not so much the refusal of global
capitalism as one of its dialectical supports: what Cheah rather bleakly calls
capitalism’s “product-effect” (IC, 166).35
The intimacy between the rhetoric of capitalism and the Asian values
controversy appears most visibly when political figures argue that the adoption
of the full civil and political rights agenda favored by the West would hamper
the economic growth and development needed to provide a way out of poverty
and access to the other universally recognized social goods necessary in modern
states (schools, medical care, and the like).36 Consider former Singapore
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew: “It is not enough to have sympathy . . . Freedom,
human rights, democracy, when you are hungry, when you lack development,
when you lack basic services, does not add up to much” (IC, 233; emphasis
34
This distinction between price and dignity should recall Smith’s speculations on the Chinese
earthquake, with which it shares the potential exchangeability of human life and human suffering. By the
time Chateaubriand presents, probably for the first time in print, the dilemma of the fortune and the
mandarin, the scene of moral decision has all the philosophical force of a Kantian imperative. No matter
how much he imagined the mandarin afflicted with disease or sorrows, in order to make it easier to kill
him, Chateaubriand writes, he “heard in the depths of my heart a voice crying out so strongly against the
simple thought of such a supposition, that I could not doubt even for an instant the reality of conscience”
(Le Génie du christianisme, as cited in Keates, 505 [translation mine]). In Chateaubriand’s text, the
wrongness of the proposed exchange between the fortune and the mandarin reproduces exactly the
difference between Marktpreis and inner Wert that allows Kant to establish the human being’s ontological
resistance to commodification—even if he happens to be far away, or sick, or Chinese.
35
I would not be quite as bleak as Cheah. By reversing his point of view, we can see that the idea
of the “market” as we understand it operates in the social imaginary as a dialectical effect of the notion
of the “human” that is technically excluded from it; as well to say, then, that the market is humanism’s
“objectivity-effect” as that humanity is the market’s “product-effect.” We are dealing here not with a
base (the market) and a superstructure (the human) but with a system structured around a mutually
constitutive dialectic, of which the distinction between economic base and humanist superstructure is
a feature of a system that may not have constitutive parts.
36
This is the thinking behind the Bangkok Declaration’s investment in recognizing the “interde-
pendence and indivisibility of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights, and the need to give
equal emphasis to all categories of human rights” (Bell et al 392); the first three categories aim to
undermine the centrality of the latter two to Western rights talk. The United States remains one of the
few nations to have refused to sign the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural
Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1965.
mine).37 Though “not much of a case against democratic rights can be established
on the basis of their allegedly negative effects on economic growth,” as Amartya
Sen has argued, the general sense that human rights grounded in sympathy and
economic growth have something to do with each other appears on the American
side of this divide as well, where the assumption of the Clinton administration
seemed to be that the East Asian economies would grow their way out of
authoritarianism into fully “civilized” democracies sometime shortly after
enough people had television and ate at McDonalds.38 It is this last position
that has been undermined by the philosophical and political arguments “for”
Asian values that, by suggesting that economic growth is possible without what
the West calls “freedom” (never mind McDonalds), attempt to separate economic
from noneconomic modernization, the capitalist legacy of the Enlightenment
from its philosophical one. This new Asian modernity would in theory derive its
rights and its theory of the human from a “nondichotomous thinking” that
encourages “organic solidarity” and emphasizes the role of the “family as the
basic unit of society.”39 The conjunction of its fantasy of development with the
one originating in New York and Washington I take to be evidence of what Arif
Dirlik means when he writes that the idea of alternative or multiple modernities
“legitimizes the most fundamental assumptions of modernization by rendering
them globally valid, forecloses serious consideration of alternatives to moderni-
zation, and reintroduces Eurocentrism by the back door,” since the concept’s
culturally pluralist pretensions are impoverished by the paucity of economic
choices it offers.40 In a post-Fordist world, everyone can have whatever
37
As Koshy has noted that statements like these offer “an alibi for authoritarianism” does not
change the fact that they also expose “Western pseudouniversialism” (24).
38
Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Economic Achievements,” in Bauer and Bell, 93. The word
“civilized” comes from Jack Donnelly, who reinforces the universalist, progressivist position when he
writes that “a society in which the self must always be categorically subordinated to other simply
cannot be considered ‘civilized’ in the late twentieth century” (Bauer and Bell, 78). As for McDonalds
and the televisions, let us update the dream for this century’s American bourgeoisie: locavore cuisine
and wireless hotspots.
39
Tu Wei-ming, 205. Elsewhere, Tu writes of the Chinese contribution to a mode of national
belonging for the twenty-first century: “The modern West’s dichotomous world view (spirit/matter,
mind/body, physical/mental, sacred/profane, creator/creature, God/man, subject/object) is diametri-
cally opposed to the Chinese holistic mode of thinking,” a sentence whose own reliance on dichotomy
(“diametrically opposed”) is curiously, well, Western (201).
40
Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, 2007), 14. For a
useful introduction to “multiple modernities,” see Stephen R. Graubard, “Preface to the Issue ‘Multiple
Modernities,’” Daedalus 129:1 (Winter 2000), as well as the other essays in that issue.
INTRODUCTION 25
modernity they’d like, as long as what they’d like is a modernity of the capitalist
type (which is to say: modernity).
Though this book does not directly address the “Asian values debate,” the
historical work it pursues ought to modify some of the premises of the debate as it
is currently articulated. Most important, the sense that East Asia has only recently
arrived on the scene of human rights discourse is undermined by the recognition
that though it is only in the 1990s that East Asia enters the debate as a speaking
subject, it has for a much longer time been one of the debate’s privileged referen-
tial objects. Though the difference in grammatical position matters, it is nonethe-
less a misreading of the historical record to imagine that an Asian “arrival” on the
scene of philosophical modernity dates back only to the moment when it acquires
the economic right to speak. The appearance of the mandarin and the “Asian
values debate” at either end of this historical process—and indeed continually
throughout it—suggests rather that any attempt to seriously consider the relation
between China and human rights must begin at the moment when China first
enters Enlightenment discourse on the human, with the recognition that the
Asian “challenge” to human rights has been operating on the inside of a larger
discourse on humanity for at least two centuries now, and that this discourse
exerts some major effects on the ways that the Asian values debate is articulated
and received. At least in the history of the imagination, which is the history of life
lived in an ideological world. Which is the kind of history that concerns us here.
4. The Example-Effect
Though all books address, one way or another, the theories of culture, of
evidence, or of historical causality that hold them together, such an address
seems especially necessary for this one, where from the beginning the relationship
between the book’s major historical elements—sympathy, the human, and
China—has been shadowed by the potentially accidental, coincidental relation-
ship that links China to the former two. It would be needlessly reductive to assert
that no difference exists between the invention of the modern human, on one
hand, and its references to China, on the other, between the well-nigh ontological
importance of the primary historical event and the rhetorical or cultural material
that accompanies it. Instead, it seems crucial to recognize that whatever twines
these objects does so only insofar as it recognizes and takes advantage of the
“generic” difference between them; to recognize, that is, that the grammar of this
relationship depends on the differing cultural and epistemological roles played by
the idea (“the invention of the sympathetic human”) and the example to which it
refers (“China”). An explicit recognition of that difference will be needed if the
book is to tell the story of what is after all an imaginary and seemingly arbitrary
relation, even if that relation continues to haunt, in the precarious lives of those
hypothetical Chinese victims, contemporary accounts of the future of human
rights and the political possibilities of globalization.41
A book that claimed that China was simply extraneous or supplemental to the
main direction of, say, Smith’s theory of moral philosophy or Balzac’s characteri-
zation of Rastignac—or that simply ignored the appearance of China in these
contexts, which is how most people handle it—would have a lot less work to do.
Here we confront the fact that though the exemplarity of examples is a problem
for any work that relies on them, for a book that is precisely about the history of a
certain kind of example and a certain kind of exemplarity (the kind, that is, that
does not “feel” exemplary) the question of the example becomes a particular and
pressing problem. No dawn for this darkness can appear solely as a second-order,
metadiscursive discussion of the generic problem, or as an attempt to argue
theoretically for the importance and reality of cultural connections and social
imaginaries, even if it is clear that part of the issue here has to do with the
epistemological status of the overdetermined, overimbricated cultural object and
its relation to history. Because the very heart of the method stems from the
difference between the “first” and “second” order of things, the “truly” historical
and the “merely” coincidental, and thus the degree to which any discussion can or
should be held historically or philosophically responsible for the qualities of
its content—whether, that is, one can separate something like the central or
41
Hunt’s 2007 history of the human rights, for instance, refers to Smith’s earthquake as it
imagines the challenges facing the future of that powerful, utopian discourse (210). Likewise,
K. Anthony Appiah’s 2006 Cosmopolitanism, whose goal it is to articulate an intellectual and political
“attitude” toward this era which continually announces itself to us as global, makes Balzac’s mandarin
a feature of its final chapter on “Kindness to Strangers,” though it does not mention his Chineseness
(Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers [New York, 2006], especially 155–58; for a discussion of
the status of the philosophical example in that book, see Bruce Robbins, “Cosmpolitanism: New and
Newer,” boundary 2 34:3 [2007], 59). Another recent philosophical discussion of the mandarin that
makes no mention of his Chineseness appears in Iddo Landau’s “To Kill a Mandarin,” Philosophy and
Literature 29 (2005). Only Keates in 1966 seems to find the mandarin’s national origin interesting,
writing that for Europeans in the nineteenth century “the rich citizen of the Middle Kingdom was yet a
citizen of an alien and remote society; indeed, the plurality of the worlds discovered in the Renaissance
has still to be fused into a new unitary world. The only unity is moral, in the limited sense that our
Chinaman-mandarin belongs to humanity [emphasis mine], and a crime or sin against him, as it
concerns the mens rea, would be as grievous as one against our next door neighbor” (504).
INTRODUCTION 27
necessary features of an articulation of the nature of human sympathy from the

apparently arbitrary choice of a Chinese mandarin as its avatar—then any
discussion that would simply articulate as though at a remove from the argument
the theory that subtends it would wind up reproducing the very problem it meant
to diagnose. If your point is that the rhetoric of an idea matters—that the choice
of examples, for instance, makes a difference to the philosophy of it, or that a set
of referential habits and historical occurrences that might not have happened
nonetheless exert some kind of effect on the shape of the habits or histories in
which they appear—then it would seem especially short-sighted to make your
claim while holding it fully separate from the examples that contextualize it and
that make it comprehensible. Or, to put things more plainly: you can’t argue that
the example matters to the idea without acknowledging that the examples you use
to show that examples matter to the idea matter to the idea that examples matter
to the idea. (The fact that China functions as a particular kind of example adds
another layer of complexity to this project.42)
In what follows, I will be calling the force of Chinese exemplarity its “example-
effect.” The phrase gestures toward Roland Barthes’ well-known notion of the
fictional “reality-effect,” which argues that details that serve no narrative func-
tion—details that are seemingly useless—have a special importance in the devel-
opment of modern fictional realism, since they testify to the presence of a world
out “there,” beyond the narrative necessities of a given story, that subtends the
novelistic world.43 Likewise the example-effect produced by “China” creates the
possibility of philosophy by appearing as a seemingly arbitrary historical or
political detail whose value lies precisely in its having “nothing” to do with the
philosophical material it illustrates. Why should we pay attention to the fact that
the earthquake happens in China, when the real issue is that Smith is inventing
the moral tradition that will change Europe, and everyone knows he was writing
about the Lisbon earthquake anyway? And the mandarin, well, he could just as
well have been Japanese, Aztec, or Lithuanian—in fact, in an early children’s novel
42
As it does in the American context, where attempts to discuss anti-Asian racism run into the fact
that once you get past the 1960s so much of the Asian stereotype is positive; to think about the history of
Asian Americans as an instance of American race relations thus requires thinking about how the
particular relation of Asian Americans to exemplarity itself constitutes part of the history that one
wishes to address. One way to frame that address thematically is the idea of the “model minority”; for an
overview of that subject, see Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia,
1999), 145–203.
43
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
(Berkeley, 1989).
of Balzac’s, that same hypothetical appears, and the person being murdered is
from New Holland!44 Let’s focus on the real issues, and drop all this cultural
nonsense. . . .
Well, yes, kind of. But if the murdered person’s nationality didn’t matter, why
did Balzac bother changing it? And how do we account for the actual history of
the planet, in which the mandarin hypothetical becomes a phrase common
enough to enter the dictionaries? Likewise for Smith’s earthquake: if he was
thinking of Lisbon, why didn’t he say so? And why hasn’t his mention of an
Indian earthquake in The Wealth of Nations (1776) caused contemporary philo-
sophers to cite and recite it as they attempt to think through questions of moral
distance?45 And why has it been so easy, somehow, to perform that same dismis-
sive operation on all kinds of historical interferences produced by East Asia,
including, for instance, the importance of Asian Americans to the history of the
United States (which has only recently begun to be recognized46), the series of
technological innovations at the heart of modern seafaring, warfare, and media
culture, Asia’s role in the economic transformation caused by modern capitalism,
and so forth? Against the temptation to simply dismiss the Chineseness in this or
any other instance—a dismissal that can only be made on the grounds of a
sureness about what “matters” for real history that I do not share—this book
traces the history of a particular social and intellectual form: the example or
instance that has traditionally been considered extraneous to the ideas it illus-
trates and explains.47 To take this form seriously requires among other things
taking it seriously as an example: recognizing that part of how it functions in
44
See Ronai, who notes, however, that it is only with the word “mandarin,” “through its
association with exotic treasures,” that the figure passes into common usage (521; translation mine).
45
India has a “very singular government in which every member of the administration wishes to
get out of the country, and consequently to have done with the government, as soon as he can, and to
whose interest, the day after he has left it and carried his whole fortune with him, it is perfectly
indifferent though the whole country was swallowed up by an earthquake,” Smith wrote (New York,
2000), 692.
46
See for instance Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era,
1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of
Modern America (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
47
This kind of exemplarity is intimately connected to what I’ve been calling the ecliptic. It’s
precisely at the boundary line of the universal or the horizon that the particular example slides most
easily into the general, as, for instance, in the ways that discussion about the sun (which is, after all, a
particular star) tends by the very fact of calling it “the” sun to make it a universalizing figure and the
absolute horizon of all human experience. Presumably people living in orbits around the three stars
that make up Alpha Centauri would mean something completely different when they referred to “the
sun.”
INTRODUCTION 29
culture is precisely as the kind of thing that does not matter very much to the
generality it illustrates, and which is consumed or interpreted by the vast majority
of readers as the kind of arbitrary reference that might just as well have referred to
something else.
Much of the work to elaborate the significance of the example-effect happens
in the book’s first chapter, which involves a sustained attention to one recent
discussion of an experience of Chinese suffering. As that chapter will make clear,
I conclude that no ethical argument about an experience that arrives to us as a
text can be made in a manner that separates it from its examples, and thus that
any evidentiary argument belongs at least partially to the examples on which it
draws—even or perhaps especially when those examples present themselves as
arbitrary. Such an approach has some interesting effects on the role of the
examples themselves, since it is only through a sustained critical engagement
with their particular language, their historical context, and the forms of their
mediatic circulation that the arguments acquire the momentum they need to
theorize themselves “away” from the examples, without for all that ever escaping
their gravitational pull. The examples in this book thus acquire a strange mixture
of particularity and generality. Though such a mixture obtains for all examples
everywhere—the function of examples is, after all, to be exemplary—in this case,
I have tried to halt the normal and normalizing transition from the particular to
the general, the instance to the instantiation, that makes the example that which
“illustrates, or forms a particular case of, a general principle, rule, state of
things.”48 The chapters that follow suspend that process at precisely the moment
at which the individual anecdote, citation, sentence, or episode threatens to cross
over into general principle, there to be replaced by a rule or state of things that
effectively erases the anecdote’s or citation’s importance qua itself—that is, its
existence as something other than an example of some idea. The examples thus
tend to exemplify the claims I am making in this introduction without becoming
for all that exemplary, without constituting the total apprehension of the cultural
network or habit whose story the book writes. Instead, they indicate points at
which that network can be said to have “touched down” with particular force,
while retaining a remainder that has in some cases very little to do with their
exemplification, but whose presence must be respected if one wishes to avoid
dismissing that remainder as accidental and thus irrelevant to the general project.
If that incompleteness can be recuperated for the book as a whole, it is because it
48
Oxford English Dictionary, example, n., 1.a.
figures (though necessarily incompletely) the general awkwardness of the Chinese

reference in European history, which it thus attempts to think in terms of its
example-effect.49
5. Outline
The chapters follow. The first presents an attempt to work out the principles
organizing the methodology of the book through an example particular to it.
A reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of the 1606 account of the torture of a
Chinese goldsmith in Java accompanies a discussion of the status of the new
historicist “anecdote.” The anecdote’s relation to language and history has al-
lowed it to become the privileged epistemological form of much contemporary
literary criticism. In a gesture typical of the method of the book as a whole, the
chapter applies to the theory of the anecdote it finds the principles of anecdotality
it articulates and generates from that operation some guidelines for the method-
ology of the subsequent chapters: the evidentiary material that sustains any
general or theoretical conclusion (be it anecdote or description, novel or poem,
photograph, medical case study, or union pamphlet) must exert both formal and
thematic pressures on the theory that it comes to sustain. This sentence’s appli-
cability to the general field of the example-effect outlined above generates the
major methodological task of this book, which is to think the relation of exem-
plarity to history within the general fields of literary and cultural criticism.
Chapters 2 through 7 do not so much exemplify the methods outlined in the
first chapter as test it in particular cases. Much of the historical argument of the
49
Because their historical range is extensive (the earliest example dates from 1606, and the latest
from 2006), their geographic and linguistic range reasonably broad (most of the material is in English,
but some is in French, German, or Chinese), and their genres diverse (travel narrative, medical case
study, photograph, novel), the examples discussed in the chapters that follow do have the advantage of
indicating a wide set of possible forms that the discourse on Chineseness, suffering, and the human
can take. They do not, however, define the entire range of discursive possibility. Among the many
things I do not discuss are the history of footbinding and the dramatic increase in recent decades in the
international adoption of Chinese children, two major sites for the expression and indeed the lived,
embodied production of the discourse on China and human life. On footbinding, see Dorothy Ko’s
excellent Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, 2005), and Wang Ping’s
Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (Minneapolis, 2000). On adoption, see Vincent Cheng,
Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, 2004), particularly chapter 4;
David L. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text 21.3 (Fall 2003); and Toby
Alice Volkman, ed., Cultures of Transnational Adoption (Durham, N.C., 2005).
INTRODUCTION 31
book takes place through the accretion of these examples, their accumulated
weight finally enough to assert the simple fact that China has consistently been
thought, in the space between sympathy and cruelty, as the ecliptic of the modern
human. Beyond that weight, however, each chapter also explores through its
major examples one possible mode of the Chinese ecliptic. So that chapter 2, on
George Henry Mason’s The Punishments of China (1801) reads the internal logic of
Mason’s literary production—its figuration of type and example, its address to its
reader, its justifications for its project, its arrangement of word and image—
against the double themes of sympathy and exchange that have organized this
introduction. And chapter 3, largely a discussion of the medical case histories and
oil portraits produced in and around the first Western missionary hospital in
China (1838–52), finds in the paintings and the reports a studiously neutral
relation to Chinese suffering that plays against the pressing possibilities of
national allegory and the individual resistance to the language of pain. Asad’s
notion of suffering as epistemological process returns heavily there, as it does
again, though less explicitly, in chapter 4, in which the particularly American
fantasy of a Chinese future defined coextensively with industrialization becomes
fodder for the paranoid and, as the chapter argues, ultimately utopian imaginings
of an early American science fiction novel (1890). Together these three chapters
constitute the first part of the book, which focuses particularly on questions of
exchange. They show how the history of Chinese suffering and sympathy in the
West has been dominated by perceived threats emerging from China as a market
(especially in chapters 2 and 4), and they illustrate the ways in which such a
domination can nonetheless fail, despite the presence of all its most conven-
tional markers, to determine the full field of representational and experiential
possibility (chapter 3).
The second part of the book, chapters 5, 6, and 7, addresses questions of
representation and representability. Chapter 5 centers on a reading of Bertrand
Russell’s 1922 trip to China, which it discusses in relation to Russell’s theory of
sensibilia and the more generally modernist investment in the discrete experience
of objects. In order to highlight the generic difference between “life” and “litera-
ture” elided in a micro-genre like the anecdote, the chapter narrates Russell’s
experience as though it were a novel, and uses this narration to reflect on the
relation between coincidence and significance, literature, and history. More
broadly, however, it is a chapter on the field of modernist studies, an attempt
to think about how or why the “problem” of China that Russell identifies in
1922 continues to seem extraneous to the philosophical project of modernist
representation, and a proposal for how to read those things—China and
representation—together through the epistemological aperture of Russell’s

theory of sensibilia.
That aperture is literalized, embodied, and violated in the subsequent chapter.
Chapter 6 provides a reading of images of surgical operations in 1970s China,
which leads to a long investigation of the relation between pain and the aesthetic,
suffering and anesthesia, these latter figured in a Benjaminian critique of photog-
raphy as a medium and given an embodied force through a lengthy discussion of
the photograph of the flayed body of an executed Chinese prisoner. That photo-
graph, taken in the early years of the twentieth century, is best known for its
appearance in Georges Bataille’s 1961 Larmes d’Eros, and the chapter spends much
time parsing the difference between the image that appears in that book and the
photograph owned by Bataille. All this ultimately allows the chapter to produce a
retheorization of the materiality of the photographic object, a theorization that it
applies, in a final turn inward, to the representation of Chinese surgeries with
which it began.
The operating room’s appearance in the Bataille chapter recalls and reflects on
the material about surgical theaters that features heavily in chapter 3. Indeed, by
chapter 6, it will have become clear that the entire question of sympathy with
which we began has transformed itself into an interest in the relation between
suffering and representation, aesthetics and anesthetics, as those terms play
themselves out continuously in the images and descriptions of Chinese bodies
the book reproduces and reads. Chapter 7, the concluding chapter, clarifies this
transformation. It follows a brief review the first part of the book, focused on the
relationship between sympathy and economic exchange, with a more lengthy
discussion of the second, focused on the relation between suffering and repre-
sentational exchange. In so doing, it shows how these four key terms—sympathy,
suffering, economic exchange, and representational exchange—establish the se-
miotic network that frames the historical discourse on China, sympathy, and
modernity (while stopping just short, probably to the great relief of most readers,
of filling out the entire Greimasian semiotic square they create). It does so with
reference to three major examples: Peter Handke’s The Chinaman of Pain (Der
Chinese des Schmerzes, 1983), Lu Xun’s preface to A Call to Arms (Nahan, 1922),
and the wildly popular contemporary museum exhibitions of plasticized corpses,
whose startling exemplifications of the “human” bring together in one final,
jarring prosopopoeia the unifying themes of this study. The book’s last section
opens, speculatively, onto the imaginary field of “sympaesthetics.” Its final sen-
tences attempt, in the spirit of that speculation, to hold open the shuttering
window of the book’s closure.
INTRODUCTION 33
6. The Mandarin (Return)
By their appearance the plasticized corpses establish an anthropomorphic coun-

terpart for our hypothetical mandarin, against whose imaginary life the rickety
consciences of the West shore their unquiet incertitudes. A little attention to his
specificity is, thus, in order. In addition to being Chinese, he is, let us note, a
mandarin, not a peasant or a seamstress, a scholar whose Kantian innerer Wert
depends at least partly, we might imagine, on the commodifiable Marktpreis of
his earned knowledge and social position. Mandarins were, as Balzac knew, state
functionaries chosen through an extensive examination process largely focused
on philosophy and literature; in the European imaginary, they functioned as
expressions of a form of governmentality whose power derived from rote memo-
rization and imitation of the Chinese classics, and which oversaw a state com-
mitted to the relentless reproduction of its own social and governmental form. By
the mid-1800s widespread historical and philosophical attacks on Asia’s historical
immutability from figures like Smith or Hegel made the mandarin a figure for
stagnation in its broadest possible meanings: historical stasis (and hence no
progress), economic stasis (hence no class mobility), and the stasis of capital,
this latter the necessary form of “a despotic state machine cornering the bulk
of the surplus and functioning not merely as the central apparatus of repressing of
the ruling class, but as its principal instrument of economic exploitation.”50 To
exchange a Chinese mandarin for a European fortune was thus, essentially, to
exchange stasis for movement, or, to put things in more explicitly economic
terms, to exchange noncirculating capital for its circulating cousin. From this
perspective Balzac’s hypothetical grasps the social imaginary binding China to the
West far more clearly than Smith’s does, because in the former’s proposed
exchange, the figuration of a particular kind of life as resistant to market pricing
(the mandarin’s fortune, like China’s history, fails to circulate) becomes through
the act that kills him a mobile inheritance whose assent to the market depends
on the fact of it already having been exchanged, once, for a life.51
50
Perry Anderson, summarizing Karl Marx’s theory of the Asiatic mode of production, in
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), 483.
51
To the mandarin’s role as a figure for a certain model of capital circulation, one can further adduce
a linguistic dimension: among the definitions the OED gives for “Mandarin” is “any obscurantist, esoteric,
or exclusive variety of a language,” which borrows from the mandarin’s economic and governmental
stereotype the sense of mobility without movement, or activity without change (mandarin, n., 2.b).
Other figures might have suggested to their auditors a different answer to the
question of exchange: would you accept the death of a slave or two in return for
cane sugar and cheap cotton?52 Would you, today, admit that the miner occa-
sionally maimed in an industrial accident is the unfortunate compensation for
reduced prices on computer motherboards? Most people alive in the past two
centuries have answered yes to questions like those, if only by the passive fact of
living in an economic system devoted to the production of surplus value. These
rewritten versions of the hypothetical will thus not fail to reveal the embarrassing
complicity of all consumers with a certain statistical violence.
This allows us to understand more clearly why the mandarin is a mandarin,
and why he is Chinese. His rhetorical function is to move the question from
the realm of politics to the realm of philosophy by screening the addressee from the
recognition that his or her life has already, and for a long time, benefited from
the exchange between life and capital proposed in the trade between mandarin
and fortune. The mandarin is just far away enough, one might say, that the real
effects of his role in the European world that imagines him can be ignored,
shifting the modal tenor of the question from “what should you do?” to “what
would you do?,” the latter obscuring behind the screen of its implied protasis (its
“if ” clause) the fact of decisions already taken and made.53
Such a concealment is ideological in the most fundamental of senses, deeply
complicit with the production of a mythology of imperialism (and indeed of capital
more generally) that aims to divorce its all-too-predictable consequences from its
life as an ideal.54 That said, we should also recognize that the removal of this decision
to the realm of the imaginary opens a potential space of resistance or revolutionary
possibility. In philosophical space, life has not yet been commodified, and the
52
Remembering that Toussaint Louverture died in a French prison in 1803.
53
In this sense, the hypothetical of the murdered mandarin can be compared to that other great
nineteenth-century hypothetical question, “What would Jesus do?” (i.e., if you were Jesus, what would
you do?) whose formal operations and cultural history have been discussed at length in Gregory S.
Jackson, “‘What Would Jesus Do?’: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic
Novel,” PMLA 121.3 (May 2006). Another project would connect the hypothetical as narrative form to
the work done in fiction by the rise of the scientific hypothesis, which John Bender has argued shares
with novelistic fiction an affinity for knowledge production based on “cases,” that is, “causal and
narrative sequences” that share “basic technologies of world making and sense making” (“Enlighten-
ment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis,” Representations 61 [Winter 1998], 15).
54
Much the same way civilian casualties caused by modern warfare, as predictable as they are to
anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention, are nonetheless understood to be extraneous
to the ideal of modern warfare and thus remain in some sense excusable, this even though the stated
ideal has never existed, and never will.
INTRODUCTION 35
addressee is not yet complicit in the system that has commodified it. The hypothe-
tical’s philosophical space permits its addressees to free themselves from the cogni-
tive dissonance established by the fact that they have in some sense already decided
this question, and thus allows them to discover and affirm for themselves the moral
ground upon which the current political and economic situation might be resisted.
The question posed by the mandarin hypothetical thus produces via its forgetting
the philosophical space necessary for thought to consider life from “the place and
with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connexion with either,” as
Smith had proposed of moral judgments in 1790 (MS, 135). Here again we see how
the example-effect of “China” (as race, as nation, as culture) reproduces the problem
of exemplarity and idea that surrounds China’s historical relation to the invention of
the modern human: it matters that the mandarin is Chinese, because his being
Chinese means that his being Chinese doesn’t matter. The function of Chineseness is
thus, paradoxically, to force the ecliptic transformation of the instance into a
universal that retains the instance in fossil form. It appears by disappearing; it
disappears by appearing. Grasping this ghostly, shifting figure in all its holomorphic
complexity is the task of the pages that follow.
1 Anecdotal Theory
Edmund Scott, Exact Discourse (1606); Stephen
Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (1990)
Form is neither the external and superficial mold into which content is poured nor the inner
truth of the text, expressed in its organic shape. It is neither an icon nor a fixed or static
structure; it is in the most fundamental sense “not given.”
—Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” MLQ 61.1 (March 2000), 37
Why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for every object?
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Toward the end of the introduction to Learning to Curse, Stephen Greenblatt cites
a long passage from Edmund Scott’s 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fash-
ions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians. The passage tells the
story of Scott’s torture of a Chinese goldsmith in Java, whom Scott believed had
participated in the theft and arson of the English “house,” or “factory.” Under
questioning, however, the goldsmith “would tell us nothing”:
Wherefore, because of his sullenness, I thought I would burn him now a

little (for we were now in the heat of our anger). First I caused him to be
burned under the nails of this thumbs, fingers, and toes with sharp hot
iron, and the nails to be torn off. And because he never blemished [i.e.,
turned pale] at that, we thought that his hands and legs had been numbed
with tying; wherefore we burned him in the arms, shoulders, and neck. But
all was one with him. Then we burned him quite through the hands, and
36
ANECDOTAL THEORY 37
with rasps of iron tore out the flesh and sinews. After that, I caused them to
knock the edges of his shin bones with hot searing irons. Then I caused
cold screws of iron to be screwed into the bones of his arms and suddenly
to be snatched out. After that all the bones of his fingers and toes to be
broken with pincers. Yet for all this he never shed tear; no, nor once turned
his head aside, nor stirred hand or foot; but when we demanded any
question, he would put his tongue between his teeth and strike his chin
upon his knees to bite it off. When all the extremity we could use was but
in vain, I caused him to be put fast in irons again; where the emmets [ants]
(which do greatly abound there) got into his wounds and tormented worse
than we had done, as we might well see by his gesture. The [Javanese]
king’s officers desired me he might be shot to death. I told them that was
too good a death for such a villain. . . . But they do hold it to be the
cruellest and basest death that is. Wherefore, they being very importunate,
in the evening we led him into the fields and made him fast to a stake. The
first shot carried away a piece of his arm bone, and all the next shot struck
him through the breast, up near to the shoulder. Then he, holding down
his head, looked up on the wound. The third shot that was made, one of
our men had cut a bullet in three parts, which struck upon his breast in a
triangle; whereat he fell down as low as the stake would give him leave. But
between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to pieces
before they left him.1
These lines present Greenblatt with an interpretive dilemma. “What are we to

do with such a passage?” he asks. “What is history to make of it? what kind of story
do we want to tell about Scott and his victim—or not to tell about them?” (LC, 12).
We might, as others have, locate such a story inside a broader history of capital-
ism, imperialism, or torture, allowing its specificity to push us toward a theory
that subsumes it. But such a reading moves too quickly from instance to abstrac-
tion, Greenblatt argues. And in its haste, it misses what really matters about this
story, he writes. Though “the link between capitalism and imperialism does
manifest itself in Scott’s writing and his actions, . . . we may doubt that this link
is sufficient to explain either the writing or the actions or doubt that its history is
the history that it most behooves us to tell when we read those terrible sentences”
(LC, 13). Though Greenblatt will finish the introduction a few pages later with an
1
Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, 1990), 11–12. Further references in
the text are cited as LC.
assured, definitive sense of the interpretive challenge he faces, here the word
“doubt” articulates his sense of the limitations of historical approaches: there
seems to be, on the edges of Scott’s narrative, something that escapes the pallid
glance of a universalizing history. Something about the terror of the sentences
generates, in the middle of this doubt that history’s eye has seen it all, the need to
tell another version of the story: the story it “most behooves us” to tell.
That story depends on a particular attachment to the literary status of Scott’s
prose, paired with a willingness to read “all of the textual traces of the past with
the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts” (LC, 14). Whatever
story we tell cannot ever quite be a conventionally disciplinary histoire because, as
Greenblatt writes, “what is unbearable about Scott’s passage exists for us in the
text, and not only in his complacent acceptance of his own acts. There is
something about the sentences themselves that is horrible” (LC, 14; emphasis
mine). Something “in the text” can be held apart from the historicity of Scott’s
acts and his acceptance of them; something in the text escapes conventional
modes of historical perception. Attention solely to the referential facts obscures
the medium of their arrival; something in the text—in the textuality of the text—
remains a crucial part of what makes it unbearable.
One sees the importance of this insistent textuality in the movement from
“passage” to “text” in Greenblatt’s phrase “What is unbearable about Scott’s
passage exists for us in the text,” where the distinction marks, however slightly,
the difference between something one moves through to history or meaning and
the tactile material of the words themselves, which impedes and detains us in a
passage whose either end opens to the light of history and event. It is in the
context of the “horribleness” of Scott’s particular language “that the victim’s
silence—the torturer’s inability to turn pain into a manifestation of his power,
to extort so much as a scream that he could then record—takes on whatever
meaning it has” (LC, 14). The agon of torture that binds Scott to the goldsmith
simultaneously realizes and allegorizes a battle over signification and absence,
language and silence. Only in the context of the passage’s own language, of
language in general, can a critic acquire the measure of its meanings. Ignoring
the language in which the story is told, barreling from event to history, obviates
the very thing that the story is about.
Greenblatt titles the section in which he cites Scott’s passage, “Fiction and
Reality.” Its principal argument is that the poststructuralist erasure of the bound-
ary between fiction and nonfiction proves “inadequate” to the task of interpreting
a text like Scott’s (LC, 15). Remembering the difference between fiction and
nonfiction “alters our mode of reading . . . texts and changes our ethical position
ANECDOTAL THEORY 39
toward them,” Greenblatt writes. “Our belief in language’s capacity for reference
is part of our contract with the world; the contract may be playfully suspended or
broken altogether, but no abrogation is without consequences and there are
circumstances where the abrogation is unacceptable. The existence or absence
of a real world, real body, real pain, makes a difference” (LC, 15). The difference
between fiction and reality, on which “any history and any textual interpretation
worth doing” depends, thus hangs on the fact of real bodies and real pain, on
the insistent reality of bodies and pain that cannot simply be reduced to language.
At the site of a body in pain, Greenblatt finds the theoretical limit to the erosion
of “traditional paradigms for the uses of history and the interpretation of
texts” (15). The articulation of this limit—conceived with explicit reference
to poststructuralist theories of language—is the major goal of Greenblatt’s
introduction.
My purpose in this chapter is to argue against this claim of Greenblatt’s while
remaining fairly close to the arguments that lead up to it. Rather than take up and
defend the simpleminded version of poststructuralism to which he alludes, or
rehearse yet another time the “debate” between the new historicist method
Greenblatt helped make famous and the deconstructive critiques of it by such
figures as J. Hillis Miller, I want to stay firmly within the ambit of Greenblatt’s
thought and attempt to open there a space for a more generous theory of
language than Greenblatt seems to allow, without then having to claim that
I have demonstrated the superiority of language over reference or the final
enculturation of the actual. I will proceed, accordingly, by reading Scott’s passage
and Greenblatt’s citation of it, and by using that reading to advance, however
slightly, beyond the theoretical structure within which the introduction to
Learning to Curse first appeared. The limit of that advance should establish a
methodological framework for the chapters that succeed this one, just as the
introduction that preceded this chapter framed the thematic and historical
presumptions and preoccupations of the book as a whole.
1. Narrative Grammar
Readers familiar with new historicism will recognize in the sentences of the
goldsmith the presence of the most privileged epistemological feature of new
historicist reading, namely the “anecdote.” Indeed, in the earlier sections of the
introduction to Learning to Curse, Greenblatt discusses at length Joel Fineman’s
essay on “the theoretical implications of new historicism’s characteristic use of
anecdotes” (LC, 5).2 As “the narration of a singular event,” Fineman had written,
the anecdote is “the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real” (HA,
56). Greenblatt elaborates: “The anecdote has at once something of the literary
and something that exceeds the literary, a narrative form and a pointed, referential
access to what lies beyond or beneath that form. This conjunction of the literary
and the referential, Fineman argues, functions in the writing of history not as the
servant of a grand, integrated narrative of beginning, middle, and end but rather
as what ‘introduces an opening’ into that teleological narration” (LC, 5).
By occupying a middle ground between reference and literature, the anecdote
resists the narratives of traditional history in favor of what Fineman calls
an “opening” that “exceeds” the literary by virtue of its “narrative form” and
its referential access to something “beyond or beneath” it. In other words, as
a “narrative form” specifically dedicated to the real, the anecdote binds story
to history. And, in this binding, the anecdote—here Greenblatt cites Fineman
again—“produces the effect of the real,” but “only in so far as its narration both
comprises and refracts the narration it reports,” that is, only insofar as its narration
in some sense reports the story it tells and reports itself reporting that story,
indicating its referential content and its narrative structure all at once (HA, 61).
The anecdote, one might say, is a passage sentences linger in, an alleyway whose dual
openings toward history and language illuminate the interior geography of its form.
The rest of this chapter examines the process whereby Scott’s passage becomes
Greenblatt’s anecdote. I argue that the appearance of the anecdote in Greenblatt’s
text—the “becoming-anecdote” of these sentences—does not happen by itself or
self-evidently, but occurs through a set of processes having to do with citational
practice, racial stereotype, and narrative form. These in turn operate inside
historical networks that have taught us how to think about the relationships
between pain, language, and Chineseness. The attention paid to these processes
and these relationships aims to undermine the grounds whereby Greenblatt
theorizes the anecdote, and through the anecdote, the relationship between
historical reality and language. This should, when it comes, feel like progress.
2
Joel Fineman’s essay appeared in the first of the two collections of work in new historicism
edited by H. Aram Veeser (“The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New Historicism,
ed. H. Aram Veeser. [New York & London, 1989]); further references in the text are cited as HA.
Stephen Greenblatt refers to Fineman again in one of the two chapters devoted to anecdotes and
anecdotality in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), which he co-wrote with Catherine
Gallagher (49–52). That Gallagher and Greenblatt refer to their two chapters on anecdotes as being
“about” new historicism, by contrast to the four chapters that are examples “of ” new historicism,
suggests something of the anecdote’s continuing importance for theorizing new historicist work.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 41
In Scott’s Exact Discourse, the goldsmith’s torture belongs to a much longer story,
in which thieves dig a tunnel under the warehouse set up by Scott and his
mission. In the process of the underground transfer of the Englishmen’s goods
to the building next door, one of the thieves accidentally starts a fire. The
resulting conflagration draws the attention of the Englishmen, who rush in to
save their goods and discover the tunnel. They follow it to the building next door
and detain everyone they find. One of the men they catch “confesses” under
torture and names the goldsmith as an accomplice.
Greenblatt cites Scott’s narrative as it appears in a version edited by William
Foster and published for the Hakluyt Society in 1943. That version differs in
several small but important ways from Scott’s original text, which is available as a
facsimile reprint from 1973.3 Among these differences is that the passage Green-
blatt cites ends in the Hakluyt edition at the end of a paragraph, whereas in Scott’s
original the narrative continues for another ten lines:
. . . they shot him almost all to pieces before they left him [end of
citation in Greenblatt, and of the paragraph in Hakluyt]: now in this
time the Admiral and the Sabindar sent us a guard of men every night,
for fear the Chinese would rise against us, but we feared it not: yet we
kept four of the men to be witnesses, that whatsoever we did (if they
should rise) was but in our own defense: after I had kept this fellow of
Jortan [a place name; this man had been held by Scott, and tortured and
questioned in the case of the theft] nine or ten days, and could prove
nothing against him, I gave him a piece of stuff [cloth] to make him a suit,
and set him free. So soon as he was out of our gates, every one that met
him took him by the hand, and greatly rejoicing would say, that now they
saw the Englishmen would do no more but justice. (ED, F3; spelling
modernized)4
3
Sir William Foster, ed. The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604–1606 (London,
1943); Edmund Scott, An Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of
the East Indians, as well Chinese as Javans, there abiding and dwelling (London, 1606); reprinted from
the copy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford as The Subtilties…of the East Indians (Amsterdam, 1973);
further references in the text are cited as ED.
4
Scott at one point refers to the “fellow of Jortan” as a “Chinese born, but now turned Javan” and
says that he is a beloved member of the community (ED, F; spelling modernized). He also describes the
Javanese community’s pleasure in his execution of the Chinese goldsmith. The phrase “Chinese turned
Javan” suggests that the fellow of Jortan is a peranakan Chinese, a member of a diaspora that began in
the tenth century. Ien Ang writes that “between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Chinese trading
quarters in cities such as Bangkok, Manila, and Batavia became large and permanent, aided by the
Though Scott does not explicitly connect the threat of anti-European violence
and his public performance of English justice, their narrative proximity indicates
the degree to which the culture of European trade throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, which depended on the deployment of physical power
against potentially aggressive foreign competitors, attempted also to produce
cultural structures that might defuse such aggression in advance. Scott’s gathering
of “witnesses” to the English’s self-defense against potential violence extends the
juridical map of crime, questioning, and punishment that organizes the narrative
of the burning warehouse to the more general context of the complex social scene
that surrounds the English presence on Java. His Exact Discourse, which is
designed to assure the East India Company’s directors of his surehanded direction
of its financial fortunes, also testifies to his attempts to produce in Java the
cultural mythology of Englishness (one he presumably believed in) that would
help distinguish the Company and the English from the other European traders
with whom they competed.
Though Scott’s awareness of his potential vulnerability to both physical vio-
lence and a more general cultural contempt participate in his projection of
imperialist power and self-justification, and are therefore of a piece with his
violent torture of the goldsmith, they nonetheless mitigate the devastating narra-
tive closure of Greenblatt’s citation, which ends with the goldsmith in pieces—a
conclusion not without self-reflexive narrative effects of its own. Its truncation
effectively organizes the anecdote as a story with a fixed beginning (“he would tell
us nothing”), middle, and end, shaping it as what the Oxford English Dictionary
calls, in its definition of the anecdote, a “narrative of a detached incident, or of a
single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking.”5 It is indeed the
singularity of the event, the self-enclosing quality of the citation in Greenblatt,
that prompts the set of interpretive questions he asks and determines the intensity
of the passage’s relation to reference.
That referential intensity—the passage’s anecdotal status, in other words—
depends as well on two other citational decisions Greenblatt makes. His
unmarked modernization of the spelling in the Hakluyt edition erases one
ascendancy of European colonialism in the region” (On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and
the West [New York, 2001], 47). The simultaneously racial and cultural politics of Scott’s situation can
thus be seen to include at least four groups: the English, the community of native Javanese, the
peranakan community, and recently arrived Chinese who do not yet qualify as having “turned Javan.”
For more on the cultural politics of contemporary peranakan Chinese, see Ang, chapters 1–3.
5
Oxford English Dictionary, anecdote, n. 2.a.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 43
potentially alienating barrier to rapid and complete understanding, the real body
and real pain in the text now appearing in our English, not Scott’s.6 And his
citation of the passage as a single block of text allows its visual form to reflect the
singular anecdotality of its narrative. One need only imagine the effect of these
same sentences cited and commented on separately over the course of a few pages
to get some sense of how the experience of these sentences as a “single event”
depends on the way in which Greenblatt cites them and makes them such a
shocking, powerful thing to read. My own citation of Greenblatt’s citation must
be understood, therefore, as a reproduction not simply of the language he takes
from Scott but also as a citation of the physical and visual arrangement of that
language in his own text. What I am responding to includes both Scott’s sentences,
then, and Greenblatt’s use of them in Learning to Curse.
So: to recognize that Greenblatt’s citation of Scott’s text creates the passage
as anecdote is to understand that the passage operates referentially in two
different contexts simultaneously. While from Scott’s perspective, this episode
might be said to have no real anecdotal status—it might, that is, be understood as
not yet separated from a broader narrative context in which Scott attempts to
impress the directors of the Company that sent him to Java—its citation in
Learning to Curse disconnects it from that context, giving it an ontological status
of its own. These sentences become visible as a single thing, gain their being as a
single story through Greenblatt’s citation. And it is through that citation that the
anecdote acquires a narrative structure that will become familiar over the course
of this book, in which a third observer located slightly to the side of the narrative
frame—a bystander, of sorts—becomes the source of a moral evaluation of the
referential events that the story presents.7 The gap between Greenblatt’s position
and Scott’s, the former’s identification with the goldsmith’s pain twinned with a
critique of the latter’s insensibility, generates this triangular narrative structure.
This is at least partially a historical claim. Though these sentences would have
shocked many of Scott’s contemporaries, and would strike some of ours as
business as usual, the difference between Scott’s position and Greenblatt’s, or
rather, the development of a critique of Scott’s position as consistent with a
6
The spelling in the Hakluyt Society edition already modernizes the original, but Greenblatt
brings it further up to date.
7
There is, to be sure, a distance between the narrator and the protagonist in Scott’s passage, made
by the temporal gap between an “I” that narrates the past history of a protagonist and the “I” of the
protagonist himself, but that temporal difference does not produce any moral or experiential distance
(narratologically: the narrator, the focalized agent, and the subject agent are the same).
“horror of cruelty,” as Greenblatt puts it, occurs somewhere inside a matrix that
includes the major shifts in cultural understandings of the meaning and value of
the human, of sympathy, and of suffering that occurred in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.8 The appearance of this narrative triangle and its moral
position on cruelty marks, therefore, one node of a transhistorical matrix with
especially complex etiologies.
In the Chinese case, these include the themes of endurance and silence: “Yet
for all this he never shed tear; no, nor once turned his head aside, nor stirred
hand or foot.”9 Though the uncanniness of endurance in torture speaks to a
general economy of bodies, violence, and pain, in which the body is simulta-
neously the instrument of its person and the weapon with which a person can be
driven out of his or her body, the endurance of this particular goldsmith does not
occur outside the anthropological history in which he appears. Consider for
instance the following passage from Bertrand Russell’s 1922 The Problem of
China: “I do not think that, in comparison with the Anglo-Saxons, the French,
or the Germans, the Chinese can be considered a courageous people, except in the
matter of passive endurance. They will endure torture, and even death, for
motives which men of more pugnacious races would find insufficient—for
example, to conceal the hiding-place of stolen plunder.”10 I will have more to say
about Russell in chapter 5, but for now I wish simply to indicate the family
resemblance between his claim and Scott’s narrative in order to show that the
8
For a discussion of arguments about the legality and appropriateness of torture in Scott’s time,
see Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (Spring 1991).
For a history of torture, see Edward Peters, Torture (London, 1985), who argues that the connection
between torture and the “inhuman” (and therefore the idea of human dignity and human rights)
establishes an anthropological argument against torture. As I will suggest throughout the book, the
European view of Chinese suffering occurs precisely at the intersection of the body as a site of human
dignity and a series of anthropological arguments, whose historical contexts have a great deal to do
with the development of a Western sense of self as modern.
9
It is hard to believe, reading Scott’s passage, that a human body could survive what the
goldsmith survives, though anyone who reads about torture quickly finds out that the body lasts, in
those circumstances, far longer than a reader of anecdotes might want it to, that in its strange and
awful endurance the body itself conspires against the prisoner, becomes a weapon for the torturer
rather than a protection for the victim. Mark Sussman, in an e-mail to me, responds to this note by
writing: “This conspiracy between the body of the tortured and the torturer perhaps marks the
disappearance of the object of torture—in this configuration the body is a weapon whose effectiveness
rests in its ability to make itself a more effective weapon, to again be turned back on itself. So that there
are only torturers, the tortured reduced to that inhuman status by their inability to inhabit their own
matter; torture is the most profound homelessness.”
10
Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York, 1922), 221 (emphasis mine).
ANECDOTAL THEORY 45
“fact” of endurance, which we might initially have imagined as a referential

feature of the anecdote, becomes from the perspective of this narratological
history a “figure” or “trope” of endurance as well.
This is true also of the goldsmith’s silence, which Greenblatt finds uncanny,
nearly unimaginable, perhaps heroic (LC, 14). It is also active: the goldsmith does
not simply fail to cry out, or even to cry; he attempts to bite off his own tongue. He
dies without having uttered a word; his only moment of expression is a “gesture”
that indicates that the ants in his wounds torment him “worse than we had done.”
The man’s silence figures, as Greenblatt notes, the very act of torture it resists. The
torturer’s domination of the victim’s body depends on its being made to cry out at
will, on control over speech and silence. The “translation of pain into power is
ultimately the transformation of body into voice,” writes Elaine Scarry in The
Body in Pain.11 The inhumanity of torture as practice calls forth, in the voice, the
very humanity of its victims. In this story, the goldsmith’s silence suggests an
inhuman strength, and the absence of his voice “justifies” the escalating inhu-
manity of Scott’s behavior. That the goldsmith finally communicates only in
response to pain caused by insects indicates, perhaps, the degree to which his
silence remains outside the boundaries of the human.
And yet this silence too operates inside an anthropological system. In the
nineteenth century suffering in silence becomes one of features of the Chinese
most interesting and impressive to Western observers. This is Peter Parker, the
American missionary doctor I discuss at length in chapter 3, describing, in 1845, a
few of his patients’ reactions to surgery performed without anesthesia: “The
patient discovered great fortitude, coolly remarking on commencement of the
first incision, ‘it hurts, doctor’”; “The patient bore the operation with heroic
fortitude, not seeming to notice the incisions”; “The patient bore the operation
with great fortitude, not uttering a word.”12 The examples can be multiplied. But
it is clear in any case that like his endurance, the goldsmith’s silence is both a
referential fact and a narrative trope, a mixed, anecdotal figure which by the time
Greenblatt reads it has a history that extends well beyond the particularities of a
single, seventeenth-century Chinese goldsmith. Rather than argue that one
11
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New
York, 1985), 42; further references in the text are cited as BP.
12
These remarks are drawn from the “Report of the Medical Missionary Society in China” dated
October 1845, from case reports prepared by Peter Parker. The citations appear on pages 4, 10, and 12,
respectively.
trumps the other (insisting that the goldsmith really did endure silently, or, on the
other hand, that this fact is just a fiction), which would suggest that the real is the
enemy of fiction, it seems important to say that in this case the fictional fact
sustains the referential one, that the two forms of facticity operate in collabora-
tion to produce whatever in the passage makes someone attend to it.
One can see the work being done by the narrative facts—themselves connected
to large-scale cultural stereotypes of the Chinese as insensitive to pain, stoic, and
so on, all of which are discussed throughout the book—on Greenblatt himself by
looking once again at his citational practice. The entire passage is cited below as
Greenblatt gives it, but a look at both the Scott and Hakluyt editions of the text
show that the sentences Greenblatt cites come from the middle of a longer
paragraph. These lines precede the anecdote:
The next day the Admiral took another of them, and sent him to me, who
knew there was but one man with him: and therefore resolved with
himself, not to confess any thing to us: he was found hid in a privy, and
this was he that put the fire to our house, this was a goldsmith, and
confessed to the Admiral, he had clipped many Ryals [the Dutch coinage
then in use; clipping involves shaving precious metal off the edges of
coins], and also coined some counterfeit: some things he confessed to
him concerning our matter, but not much, the which the other had
confessed before, but he would tell us nothing, [Greenblatt citation begins]
Wherefore because of his sullenness, and that it was he that fired us,
I thought I would burn him now a little, for we were now in the heat of
our anger. (ED, F2; spelling modernized)
The narrative value of the goldsmith’s silence must surely be considered in the
context of his multiple confessions to the Admiral for crimes only tangentially
related to the theft and fire, and in relation to Scott’s supposition that it served a
purpose, namely that the goldsmith knew that only one other man—who had
been executed a day earlier—could implicate him in the crime.13 His silence in the
face of Scott’s torture, like his confessions to the Admiral, can therefore be read, at
13
The Hakluyt edition Greenblatt uses omits “and that it was he that fired us” from the final
sentence of this citation; this diminishes the rhetorical effect created by the movement from “burn” to
“fired” to “heat,” in which the literal “burn” and the figurative “heat” make “fired” function literally
and figuratively (that is, sylleptically), driving the synecdoche “us” before it. In the shortened version,
Scott’s torture appears even more brutish and self-indulgent than Scott’s text makes it; this in turn
increases the reality-effect of the text, which skews Greenblatt’s reading of the passage, as I go on to
argue.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 47
least inside the terms of Scott’s narrative, as a strategic gesture operating inside an
economy of public justice. Given that Scott had at one point announced to a
delegation of townspeople that he would not wrongfully shed the blood of an
innocent man “for all the goods in the world,” the goldsmith may well have
been counting on the very principles of English justice that Scott later attempted
to illustrate by releasing the man from Jortan to keep him from being killed
(ED, E4).
The appearance, or should I say re-appearance, of the most shocking or heroic
elements of Scott’s story in nineteenth- and twentieth-century statements about
Chinese people, taken together with a consideration of the larger context within
which these sentences appear, alter the anecdote’s referential force by suggesting
that the narrative as it appears in Greenblatt depends at least partly on a literary
history that precedes it. It also opens the more radical possibility that Scott’s own
experience of his torture of the goldsmith did not move unmodified through the
“anecdotal” passage that leads from phenomenological experience to the mental
experience of the real: that whatever he saw or heard was altered as it was
processed into “experience” and “language” by historical forces, including the
history of race, but also the history of storytelling, which formed the very ground
of Scott’s openness to the world. That Scott’s sentences can be shown to belong to
a narrative or experiential tradition—precisely to the tradition this book aims to
elucidate—does not mean that this particular Chinese goldsmith was not hero-
ically silent; nor does it diminish the fact of his felt pain. But it suggests that the
referential weight of Scott’s language may borrow something from a narrative
tradition in which it participates.
The placement of this anecdote into a network, part of a general accumulation
of such event-texts, aims to mine the anecdote’s referential weight while recog-
nizing the experience of such weight as itself already caught up in the projections
of narrative. This neither to undercut the event’s actuality, nor to suggest that the
event itself is simply another fiction, but to recognize the ways that narrative
expectations shape not only the “terrible sentences” but also the experience of
reading them, or even of writing them. Or, to put it slightly differently: the
goldsmith’s relation to his pain might have been an event for the goldsmith;
but for Scott, it was a culturally organized narrative. That the sentences he wrote
to tell its story would emerge four centuries after the event as a “passage” and an
“anecdote” that testify to reality beyond the fictionality of fiction suggests, despite
the vast moral difference between Scott’s relation to the torture and Greenblatt’s,
the historical power of these narrative tropes to generate cultural work. The
challenge is how to read, recognizing that.
What one might say, to begin, is that two of the crucial, linked facts of Scott’s
passage, two of the facts that seem to speak the most violent possible intersection
of imperialism and resistance to imperialism, namely torture and a corresponding
silence/endurance, have come to be major features of the Western representation
of Chinese people. As with Russell’s claims about the “passive endurance” of the
Chinese, these facts function at the level of stereotype and as a kind of rough
sociology, in which a series of personal experiences produce a general theory of
the race. I need not, at this late stage, spend time discussing the limitations of such
an epistemological process. But what is worth remarking is that it operates on
roughly the same epistemological model as the one Greenblatt proposes in his
introduction: it depends, that is, on anecdotes. In text after text on China, a claim
about the race or nation in general is sustained by an illustrative example, chosen
precisely because the anecdote is the “literary form or genre that uniquely refers to
the real,” to cite Fineman again. Lydia Liu, writing about Arthur Smith’s notori-
ous Chinese Characteristics, refers to Smith’s habit of using anecdotes to support
general theories of “the Chinese” as part of a “powerful grammar of truth.”14 In
this case, that same grammar operates in reverse: whereas for Smith the anecdote
sustains the general theory, here the general theory legitimates the referentiality of
the anecdote: of course the goldsmith would be silent, because the Chinese are
notorious for their silence under torture.
The moving referential facts of the Chinese goldsmith’s endurance and his
silence are themselves, that is, already the product of a relation to anecdotality,
whether in advance of the development of the stereotype or, more likely, in some
collaboration with them. The anecdotal structure of these facts—which in each
case come from anecdotes and become “theories” of the Chinese—thus operates
from inside the passage that contains them. Whatever anecdote emerges from the
collocation of these terrible sentences and this terrible event cannot therefore be
understood as the origin of the referential scene it presents. Nor, vice versa, can
any experience of that scene (and perhaps especially not Scott’s) be understood
simply as the origin of the sentences that pretend to document it, or the ones that
make it an anecdote.15
14
Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in
China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, 1995), 56.
15
This is not simply true in relation to the Chinese stereotype. One of the passage’s more striking
moments occurs when the goldsmith looks at the damage done to his body: “Then he, holding down
his head, looked up on the wound.” On one hand the implications of this as event—considered as an
experiential moment—are devastating; one might say that the victim’s self-regard presents him with
the occasion to observe, as though from the outside, the decimation of his own body. On the other,
ANECDOTAL THEORY 49
Rather than argue, however, that this internal imbrication with anecdotality
delegitimizes Greenblatt’s theorization of the form, I want to suggest that the
complexity of this particular anecdote makes the theory Greenblatt develops in
Learning to Curse even more illuminating than it is in its original elaboration.
Whereas Greenblatt might be said to want to emphasize the degree to which
anecdotes approach a reality untouched by other literary forms—their having “at
once something of the literary and something that exceeds the literary, a narrative
form and a pointed, referential access to what lies beyond or beneath that
form”—my reading of this passage-become-anecdote suggests that whatever
“lies beyond or beneath” literary form—that is, the world itself—can in its
turn be said to possess “something of the referential and something that
exceeds the referential, an event-ful form and a pointed, literary access to
what lies beyond or beneath that form.” Just as the anecdote points us to the
referential beyond the literary, so does it point us to the literary beyond the
referential; so does it suggest that whatever “beyond” one posits as the limit
past which language games are unacceptable is itself constituted, in turn, by
the possibility of the “beyond” that is literariness itself. And not necessarily
because of some overarching theory of the inability of language to refer (though
that, too), but because in this case the anecdote can clearly be shown to
borrow the mode of expression of the real—and perhaps even of its perception
—from literary figures that exist outside the “beyond” of the goldsmith’s torture
as event. In this sense, the anecdote’s unique mixture of reality (the “beyond
or beneath” of literary form) and literariness is the obverse of its unique
mixture of the literary, as the beyond or beneath of the real, and the world as
consider the description of the 1757 execution of Damiens the regicide, which Foucault cites on the first
pages of Discipline and Punish, and which serves as a model or precursor to the New Historicist
anecdote: “After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens, who cried out profusely, though without
swearing, raised his head and looked at himself; the same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot
containing the boiling potion, which he poured liberally over the wound.… Despite all this pain, he
raised his head from time to time and looked at himself bodily.… The horses tugged hard, each pulling
straight on a limb, each horse held by an executioner.… after several attempts, the direction of the
horses had to be changed, thus: those at the arms were made to pull towards the head, those at the
thighs towards the arms, which broke the arms at the joints. This was repeated several times without
success. He raised his head and looked at himself ” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan [New York, 1979], 4 [emphases mine]. I am grateful to Christine Baumgarthuber for
calling my attention to these sentences). Whether or not Damiens looked at himself, the fact that he is
described as doing so three times in the space of a single page (the account is written by an officer of
the watch) indicates the anecdotal importance of this gesture, which is taken to signify something so
important it must be repeated three times. But what? And to what extent, we might wonder, did
Damiens’ behavior emerge from his own sense of what was expected of him?
such. To say this is not, I think, to engage in poststructuralist play about

fiction and nonfiction. It is rather to observe that it is precisely because the
anecdote “confounds” fiction and nonfiction, story and reference, that it
acquires such a powerful epistemological force, providing Greenblatt with a
rhetorical device around which to structure his introduction as well as a theoret-
ical model and justification for the essays in Learning to Curse. A model with
a force perhaps beyond, as I am suggesting here, what Greenblatt himself
finds in it.
2. Pain’s Language of Agency
The shockingly luminous quality of the events Scott describes—reading the

passage feels like staring into the sun—comes in large part from its description
of an act of torture and of the victim’s implacable suffering. Torture is an act
designed, at least in its self-justifications, to make its victims talk. Faced with
the goldsmith’s silence, Greenblatt asks, “is it the historian’s task, after all this
time, finally to compel him to speak?” (13). The question remarks the potential
conjunction between Greenblatt’s interpretive desire and Scott’s torture of the
goldsmith; it suggests that the historian’s task is, like Scott’s, though in another
medium, to produce speech out of silence, meaning out of inscrutability.16
Though this potentially devastating ethical comparison does not, rightly, detain
16
I am not sure that in any case the passage can be interpreted to make the victim speak.
Greenblatt confounds—unhelpfully, and with a bias toward the referential unjustified, I think, even by
his claims regarding the anecdote’s power—the literary text with the actual victim. One can describe
and interpret the anecdote, and Greenblatt is doing so, as am I; in some sense the mere citation of the
text allows it speech in a new time and for new tongues. One can also interrogate—a verb that has not
come into the critical parlance for nothing—the terms under which such a passage could come to be
written, as Greenblatt does in his introduction. But the goldsmith? What could or would he possibly
have to say in or to the present? What could you want him to say? The slippage between the passage—
which is written, after all—and the victim, the idea that one could make the latter speak through a
reading of the former, does not to me suggest a respect for the victim’s suffering in the real but rather
an erasure of it. (To a very large extent the slippage depends on the metaphor of speech and the more
general new historicist language of animation, of a critical waking of the dead [cf. Gallagher and
Greenblatt 69, the closing of Greenblatt’s “What is the History of Literature?” (Critical Inquiry 23.3
[1997]) or, indeed, the famous opening to Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: “I began with the
desire to speak with the dead” (Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England [Berkeley, 1989].)]). Jacques Derrida has written enough on the implications of
metaphors of voice as breath and animation—see particularly the first section of Of Grammatology—
for thinking about writing that I do not feel compelled to go through things here.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 51
Greenblatt for long, it nonetheless indicates his awareness of the potential

conjunction between the anecdote he cites and the process of literary criticism.
In this sense, the anecdote presents us with a willing allegory of the act of
interpretation.17 Greenblatt’s recognition of the metaphoric conjunction of in-
terpretation and torture suggests once again that the anecdote’s content interferes
with the perception of its form, that whatever theory of the anecdote occurs here
also acts as a theory of the act of interpretation that allows us to see the passage as
an anecdote, or, for that matter, to read it at all. Whatever theory of the anecdote
is emerging from this rereading of Scott’s passage and Greenblatt’s citation will
not be able to argue that the theory of anecdote is exclusively a theory of narrative
form. It is also a matter of interpretive practice.
We can continue further along the path suggested by this opening by attending
specifically to the passage as a description of torture. It does not, one might begin
by noting, describe the goldsmith’s pain. Rather pain, when it appears, does so
most clearly through the descriptions of the physical agents of torture, the screws
and bullets and irons that cause the pain. Greenblatt insists pointedly on the
reality of this pain, but an attention to its linguistic appearance suggests that
whatever reality this pain obtains stems from descriptions that fail in any instance
actually to describe it as pain.
The gap between the goldsmith’s pain as the reader feels it and that pain itself,
the degree to which Scott’s sentences reproduce that pain without representing or
being it, can be understood as a function of what Scarry calls pain’s “language of
agency.”18 Those who wish to speak of pain, Scarry writes, will often rely on
metaphors that specify “an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is pictured as
producing the pain,” or that describe “bodily damage that is pictured as accom-
panying the pain. Thus a person may say, ‘It feels as though a hammer is coming
down on my spine,’ even when there is no hammer” (BP, 15). Insofar as descrip-
tions of physical or imaginary agents
convey something of the felt-experience of pain to someone outside the

sufferer’s body, they both do so for the same reason: in neither case is the
nail identical with the sentient experience of pain; and yet because it has
17
Though with the following depressing result: that the goldsmith’s uncanny silence, which
finally testifies, in the Exact Discourse, to the diligence of Scott’s efforts on behalf of the Company, can
be said to represent in Learning to Curse the degree to which even the most recalcitrant silence will
signify, in the hands of the right kind of interpreter, in a manner suited to the latter’s needs.
18
Greenblatt briefly cites Scarry in his introduction (LC, 14); I am extending that act of reference.
shape, length, and color, because it either exists (in the first case) or can be
pictured as existing (in the second case) at the external boundary of the
body, it begins to externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is origi-
nally an interior and unsharable experience. (BP, 15–16)
Pain comes into language through metaphor. The instrument of pain (imagi-
nary or real) articulates and objectifies “unsharable,” nonlinguistic experience
by producing a tangible image of its cause, and this tangible image in turn
expresses metonymically the unspeakable effect that readers imagine it would
create on them. The language of agency, then, produces a threefold process
that moves pain first through metaphor (it is described in terms of a causal
agent), then metonym (the agent’s effect is deduced from its cause), and
then identification (what kind of pain would that cause me?). What one
“feels” at the end of such a process is, therefore, never the other’s pain, but
rather the constructed fiction of that pain. The complex act of generosity
such empathy requires is also, therefore, a literary act produced through the
movement of language in its relation to the real world that it both describes
and fails to be.19
Because it occurs in language, this descriptive act is not without its pitfalls,
which depend precisely on a confusion between the signifiers and signifieds in
the production of pain. Scarry writes that “the mere appearance of the sign
of a weapon in a spoken sentence, a written paragraph, or a visual image . . . does
not mean that there has been any attempt to present pain and, on the contrary,
often means that the nature of pain has just been pushed into deeper obscurity”
(BP, 18). While one clearly sees the operation of this obscuring function
almost everywhere in Scott’s passage, with its relentless focus on the physical
agents of pain, the irony of its operation—that pain often seems most visible
19
Jean Améry makes a similar argument in relation to his own torture at the hands of the Nazis:
It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was
it ‘like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,’ and was another ‘like a dull wooden stake that had
been driven into the back of my head’? One comparison would only stand for the other,
and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative
speech. The pain was what is was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling
are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of
language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be
forced to inflict it and therefore become a torturer himself.
(“Torture,” Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, ed. Lawrence L. Langer [New York, 1995] 130)
ANECDOTAL THEORY 53
there where it is precisely not—also clarifies the importance of the only moment
at which the goldsmith “speaks”: “the emmets [ants] (which do greatly abound
there) got into his wounds and tormented worse than we had done, as we
might well see by his gesture.” That this moment produces (in me, at least) far
less sympathetic pain than much of the rest of the narrative shows how little
the readerly experience of the goldsmith’s pain actually has to do with his
ability to communicate it. Instead, that pain appears most forcefully, becomes
most real and objective, when it is metaphorized in the instruments of torture
(which are themselves, let us not forget, metaphors made by the torturer). The
screws and irons that the goldsmith never describes himself substantiate his
pain in a way that his gesture cannot. Pain thus appears most forcefully to the
reader not on the surface of the body but in the weapons that figure it most
vividly, its nature—that is, its being as an unspeakable, unsharable referential fact
that can only appear otherwise—obscured by the very objects that create it in the
first place.
Insofar as the vast majority of descriptions of pain rely upon the language of
agency, any testimony regarding the presence of pain will necessarily be anecdotal.
To talk about pain is to be talking about the difference between language and
reference; any claim that pain has occurred (even to the self) asserts its own
truth only insofar as it tends to construct a compelling figure or narrative about
the shape and feeling of the pain that objectifies that pain in language. While
pain itself, then, bears no resemblance at all to the anecdote as Greenblatt theorizes
it, any given sentence about pain may well be said to engage the same binocular
look toward language and reality that characterizes the anecdote. Language
about pain shares the anecdote’s double bind: it is a detour from reality that
leads to a powerful sense of the real. Any sentence about pain, one might say,
“has at once something of the literary and something that exceeds the literary,
a narrative form and a pointed, referential access to what lies beyond or beneath
that form” (LC, 5). Pain’s language of agency produces that referential access
most successfully when the literary qualities of its expression are at their most
compelling. And those qualities are at their most compelling when their meta-
phors most successfully confound the gap between language and the pain to
which it refers.
The tendency to make felt pain a limit beyond which certain textualist
modes of reading are not allowed can now be understood as a misrecognition of
the fact that pain is precisely that thing that language can never access as such.
Rather than think of pain as a limit for language, as that which finally proves
language’s impotence in relation to reality, think of pain as a limit of the real, as
that experience or place from which the real births itself into language, apparently
as a corpse.20
3. Anecdotal Theory
Scott’s sentences do not, then, become just any anecdote. Let me pause to take
stock of their various implications.
As I have been trying to show, the anecdote acquires the full weight of its
significance for Greenblatt and for this chapter along four major lines, two more
or less formal, two roughly thematic.
• Formal line number one: The passage acquires its status as anecdote from
its appearance in Greenblatt’s introduction. Its citation as a single
uninterrupted block of text, the correspondence of that block with a
classic narrative arc, and Greenblatt’s role as an extradiegetic narrator
combine to make it into the “interesting” single event that characterizes
the anecdotal form.
• Formal line number two: The passage borrows two of its crucial features,
silence and endurance, from the history of Chinese stereotypes, which
themselves may well borrow from even older literary historical tendencies
expressed in Stoic texts and in the quasiromances of the early Christian
martyrs.21 This borrowing, though it appears most visibly at the thematic
level, must be understood as the articulation of a narrative or historical
form whose emergence into anecdote operates within the basic
epistemological structure of anecdotal racism—and which therefore
participates in the production of the anecdote as micro-genre.22
20
The reversal in the end amounts to more or less the same thing; if my version seems “new,” it is
because it attempts to undo a cliché that has too long opposed weak language to strong reality.
Bemoaning the “failure” of pain to communicate itself (or to be communicated by language) is like
being sad that a stone can’t read. The tendency to articulate this kind of “failure” in the language of
reproduction (as I do deliberately here, with “impotence” and “births”) simply reproduces, in its own
way, a fantasy of nonfailure connected to an anthropomorphized sense of the possible.
21
On the “subversive agenda” articulated by the silent suffering of the Christian martyrs, of their
endurance of pain and indeed their inviolability in relation to it, see Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self:
Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London, 1995), 104.
22
It seems worth saying that “anecdote” operates in two separate but connected dimensions. In
the case of racism, the anecdote functions metonymically, as evidence of a general theory of which it is a
telling example; as a figure for how to do literary criticism, on the other hand, the anecdote operates as
a metaphor, an allegory of critical form. I am grateful to Rebecca Walkowitz for suggesting this
distinction to me.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 55
• Thematic line number one: The anecdote’s recounting of an episode of

torture can be shown to interfere metaphorically with Greenblatt’s sense of
the task of the historian or literary critic. This allows him to produce an
interpretation that makes the anecdote “speak” against poststructuralism
and for the reality of the real. This interpretation can be read as an allegory
of Scott’s torture of the goldsmith, putting the critic and the torturer on
the same rather than opposite sides.
• Thematic line number two: The anecdote’s evocation of pain, or rather, its
use of Scarry’s “language of agency” to evoke pain (and thus its production
of theme through form), appears to have a profound relationship to the
very problem of language and reference that the anecdote as form had
seemed initially to resolve. That is, although the anecdote of the goldsmith
had seemed in Greenblatt’s introduction to guarantee the presence of a
tangible ground for historical literary criticism, the analysis of its
pain-language threatened to expose that ground as the objectified
linguistic remnant of an unapproachable real.
While the first of these lines might be said to apply to any theory of the
anecdote in general—that it must be produced out of an undifferentiated or less-
differentiated mass of language and experience in order to acquire the properties
that will make it recognizable as an anecdote—the other three come out of a
reading of the content of this anecdote in particular. Whatever methodological
theory will be left over after this analysis, then, will have to be a theory of “the
anecdote of the goldsmith” in particular rather than a theory of the anecdote in
general, an intertwining of form, context, and content that does not promise
much in the way of universal applicability. Given that being universally applicable
is one of the things that theories are supposed to do, it hardly seems right to call
what’s left a theory at all.
Nonetheless it seems worth pressing on, if only to see how one might turn this
remainder into something useful for the rest of the book. A theory of the
anecdote in general and one of the goldsmith’s anecdote in particular share
a fundamental premise, namely that the anecdote is a privileged site of the
relation between literariness and reality and that its special narrative and histori-
cal claims exert an interpretive pressure on the critics who read it. Whereas
in Greenblatt’s introduction this theory seemed to emerge exclusively from
the anecdote’s formal properties as Fineman described them, however, my
reading of that same anecdote suggests that anecdotes are not born but made
and that this becoming relies on the operations of anecdotal form and on the
particular qualities, referents, and themes of its content. Rather than argue that
an attention to the qualities of Greenblatt’s anecdote undermines the theory he
proposes, then, it seems most useful to revise the general theory as a particular
theory: an “anecdotal theory,” to borrow Jane Gallop’s phrase,23 in which the
properties associated with this anecdote (functioning as an example of anecdo-
tality in general) come to interfere with the properties of a theory that would stem
from it, so that the theory that comes out of the reading finds itself limited by the
particular act of reference that makes it possible to think itself as theory, the
“exemplary” anecdote and the theory exerting a kind of mutual gravitational pull
that keeps either one from falling too far toward the wells of absolute historical
particularity, on one hand, or universal applicability, on the other. A theory of the
goldsmith’s anecdote remains anecdotal insofar as it depends on and draws from
the particular circumstances of its emergence in Scott’s Exact Discourse, Green-
blatt’s Learning to Curse, and in this chapter of this book. It is in this sense largely
strategic, and therefore of limited use. But its utility emerges at least partially in
the form of a self-reference: the production of the anecdotal theory itself has
permitted these pages to organize through both anecdote and theory some of
the book’s major thematic problems, namely, the relations between reference,
sympathy and the representation of suffering, and the degree to which any
experience of those relations (in 1606, 1990, or 2009) interferes with, and is
interfered with by, Europe’s historical encounter with and production of China
and Chineseness.
The major difference, finally, between the general theory of the anecdote as
Greenblatt articulates it and the anecdotal theory of the anecdote as I have
developed it here is that the latter restores the balance between the literary and
the referential, which in Greenblatt’s introduction had been powerfully skewed,
despite the claims made for the anecdote’s unique position between literariness
and reality, toward the latter. “The existence or absence of a real world, real body,
real pain,” Greenblatt had written, “makes a difference” that any history or textual
interpretation “worth doing” will have to speak to (15). But language too is
23
See the introduction to Anecdotal Theory, in which Jane Gallop writes, “‘Anecdote’ and ‘theory’
carry diametrically opposed connotations: humorous vs. serious, short vs. grand, trivial vs. overarch-
ing, specific vs. general. Anecdotal theory would cut through these oppositions in order to produce
theory with a better sense of humor, theorizing which honors the uncanny detail of lived experience”
([Durham, N.C, 2002], 2). This differs, especially with its emphasis on the trivial or humorous, from
Greenblatt’s use of the anecdote in Learning to Curse, but of course that difference depends on the
thematic content of the anecdotes each author chooses.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 57
real. Any historical or textual interpretation worth doing will remember and work
through its particular modes of being, including its typologies (true, false), its
genres (fiction, nonfiction, anecdote), its narrative-historical tropes (the silence
and endurance of the Chinese), and its rhetorical or psychological figures (meta-
phor, metonym, identification). Greenblatt’s extensive attention to the crime
committed against the Chinese goldsmith takes his real body and real pain so
seriously that it misses the degree to which its own theory of literary interpreta-
tion borrows from and depends on the linguistic qualities that make that body
and pain “present” in Scott’s sentences. Or, to put it rather more extravagantly:
the presence of the real in Greenblatt’s anecdote—which justifies the outrage he
directs both at Scott and at the poststructuralist critics with whom he disagrees—
derives its leverage from linguistic features (narrative tropes of Chinese pain, the
experiential authority of the anecdote, the impossibility of speaking pain)
operating inside the presence of presence, and which, rather than making that
present present, simply indicate the degree to which the production of presence is
subject to linguistic operations that are most successful when they obscure their
own role in that production.
So it is that the literary experience of pain exists precisely at the nexus of a
powerful, felt experience of the reality of another person’s body and pain, on one
hand, and the formal and thematic operations of the language that makes that
pain viscerally present, on the other. That the former is so powerful as to produce
an insistence that the scene of pain or torture cannot be the subject of certain
kinds of reading (including poststructuralist ones) is a measure of the special
hold pain has upon the contemporary imagination (and not, you will have
observed, on Scott’s). But as I have suggested, this insistence comes out of a
forgetting—one encouraged by the sentences as literary and referential objects—
to read the historical and narrative forms at work inside and around the text’s
sentences, and, therefore, inside or around the experience to which they refer. The
sentences about the Chinese goldsmith anecdotalize this process by enacting its
major mechanisms and figures in the referential space of its appearance in both
Scott’s text and Greenblatt’s, reminding us that stories about Chinese suffering in
particular have had a hold on European and American imaginations in the era of
modernity, and inviting a set of questions that permit another necessary working
through of the evidentiary status of experience.
That last phrase refers to Joan W. Scott’s now-classic essay on “The Evidence of
Experience.” Speaking of the relationship between experience as an epistemolog-
ical category and the work of antifoundationalist historians, Scott writes that “the
evolution of ‘experience’ appears to solve a problem of explanation for professed
anti-empiricists even as it reinstates a foundational ground” for their work.24

My argument is that the anecdote’s referential qualities allow Greenblatt to
restore as the foundational ground for literary–historical criticism the “real
bodies” and “real pain” that appear in the story of the goldsmith’s torture, and
that such a restoration of foundations ought to produce more philosophical
suspicion, rather than less, when it allows its readers to feel good about being
on the proper side of history, namely on the side of the goldsmith’s body rather
than that of Scott’s language.
Greenblatt’s transposition of the referential and literary qualities of Scott’s
sentences into another formal structure, namely that of the anecdote, opens up
the question of literary and historical interpretation precisely there where Scott
had tried, by calling his narrative an Exact discourse, to assert the seamless
relation between language and reality. Greenblatt thus makes possible a meta-
analysis designed to determine how each text generates from within itself a
relationship between narratorial perception and the reality of its referential
claims, a method that suggests that narrative form is the modality through
which perception is, if not lived, then at least communicated.25 Applying that
idea to Greenblatt’s own perception, citation, and renarration of Scott’s sen-
tences, and pairing it with a reading of the content of the sentences in question,
I attempted to extend Greenblatt’s thinking so as to produce a theorization of this
mode of analysis that would recognize the degree to which its interpretive targets
also functioned as sources. If the resulting theory of the goldsmith’s anecdote—
which is both a theory of interpretation and an illustration of the colluded
operations of sympathy (including Greenblatt’s sympathy), China, and the pro-
blems of the representationality of representation—is to survive beyond the arena
of its own immediate applicability, it must prove useful in contexts beyond those
of its own production.
Whether it can depends on your willingness to read the goldsmith’s anecdote
not simply as an example of a particular mode of reading, but also as a possible
theory of reading in general. Such a theory, if true to its origins in anecdote,
cannot, however, go on to suggest that any given theory can be made, with
enough pressure on its examples, to seem anecdotal. Such a sweeping claim
might be theoretical, but it would not be anecdotally so—that is, it could not
24
Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991), 781.
25
I paraphrase Stuart Hall’s insight that race is the modality in which class is lived. For a
discussion of Hall’s idea specifically within the context of the transnational movement of texts and
people, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, 1993), 85.
ANECDOTAL THEORY 59
be true to the anecdotally theorized work that has come out of this particular
anecdote, the work that the reading of this particular anecdote has made possible.
Rather, this particular theorization of the relation between fact and reality—a
theorization of a relation that depends on a notion of anecdotality for its
structure and intensity—must, unlike other theorizations of that same relation,
ultimately return to its anecdotal origins in order to recognize its own beginnings
in the encounter between literature and reference. If such a theorization can be
useful to this book as it proceeds, it can be useful only insofar as it suggests that
the evidentiary material that sustains any general or theoretical conclusion (be it
anecdote or description, novel or poem, photograph, medical case study, or
union pamphlet) must exert both formal and thematic pressures on the theory
that it comes to sustain, so that ideas about anecdotes will express, however
strongly or mildly, something of that anecdotal origin in their form, ideas about
newspaper articles will owe something to the fact that they are about that
particular form of mass production, claims about paintings or photographs will
be responsible to the histories of those media, and to the longer histories of the
image, and stories about torture will provoke an awareness of the figurative
torture of interpretation, as we have seen. This in turn suggests that any forth-
coming reading needs to pay a special attention to the manner in which its
primary evidence emerges into its being as theme and form, that is, the ways in
which reference articulates itself (or is articulated) within a generic framework
that transforms it, or translates it, with the inevitable emendations, omissions,
and additions, into something communicable. And it proposes, finally, that the
book itself, considered as an articulation of methodology it pursues, will come in
time to exert something of an effect on that methodology, and even that such a
methodology might apply some pressure on whatever theory of the “book” (or of
academic work) this book itself articulates. Though I am ultimately less likely
than most to be able to read those particular effects, the neatness of this return,
the fact that theoretical methodology of the book itself has been made to appear
through a reading of the very material that organizes it as a single project, the fact
that it has been produced through both a formal reading of the anecdote and a
thematic reading of the crime of torture against a Chinese man, fills me with an
immense, jubilant terror.
2 The Compassion Trade
Punishment, Costume, Sympathy, 1800–1801
No interpretation pretends to be the description of a work, as one can speak of the description
of an object or even of a consciousness, the work being an enigmatic appeal to understanding.
Interpretation could perhaps be called the description of an understanding, but the term
‘description’ because of its intuitive and sensory overtones, would then have to be used with
extreme caution; the term ‘narration’ would be highly preferable.
—Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
The temporal gap between the literal and the allegorical meaning of a text is . . . the designated
field of interpretive labor.
–Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119.1 (2004), 21
1. Costumes and Customs
Rather than spend the rest of the book searching for more goldsmith-style anecdotes
upon which to work the analysis developed in the previous chapter, with the
inevitable happy results, it seems crucial now to try to ignore or even violate
the reading done so far by moving into a series of objects—some images, some
texts—which, though they continue to demonstrate a fascination with the com-
bined facts of sympathy and China, do so in rather different historical, literary, and
mediatic forms. I would like, therefore, to turn from Stephen Greenblatt’s introduc-
tion, whose long reach backward had put us at the turn of the seventeenth century,
to examples that treat the relation between China and sympathetic exchange in a
more recent and entirely different mode.
60
THE COMPASSION TRADE 61
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Miller, a London

publisher, printed a series of books on the “costume” of various national tradi-
tions, including Russia, Austria, Turkey, and, in a nice reminder that interest in
the foreign and the unfamiliar had complex geographic boundaries in the early
nineteenth century, Great Britain. The publisher’s preface to The Costume of Great
Britain summarizes the general epistemological and spectacular hopes of the
series:
By presenting to the eye a series of judiciously selected and well executed

pictorial representations, forming striking portraits of single subject, ac-
curately finished in the colours of the original, and aided by short descrip-
tive essays, [these books] give more pleasing and definite ideas of the
external character, style of dress, and peculiarity of occupation, than can
be acquired by any other method, except actual personal observation.1
Imagined as the next best thing to personal observation, the volumes aimed to
delight and instruct armchair travelers by giving them the visual material of
culture and the interpretive means to decode it, working from the external
character, dress, and occupational habits visible on the surface of these color
images toward an entire field of cultural representation.
This cultural project, coupled with a strong preference for “striking portraits
of a single subject,” exerts a powerful influence on the formal structure and
appearance of the two books in the series written by George Henry Mason.
Though Mason had, as a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s 36th Regiment based in
southern India, spent several months convalescing in Canton in late 1789 and
early 1790, almost nothing in either of his books gives any sense of his own
experience there. The color plates function instead as instances or illustrations of
general Chinese practices, as for instance in the caption to an illustration of a man
playing a tambourine, which appeared in Mason’s 1800 The Costume of China:
“The Chinese have various instruments of the drum kind; but there is none which
1
A full list of the volumes in the series appears in William Pyne’s The Costume of Great Britain:
The Costume of Turkey, The Military Costume of Turkey, The Costume of Russia, The Costume of Austria,
The Costume of Spain and Portugal, The Costume of Italy, The Costume of Rio Janeiro, And Its
Neighborhood, and The Ancient Costume of Great Britain, in addition to the two China volumes I
discuss below (iii; the sentence cited above is from ii). The edition of Pyne that I cite is a 1989 reissue
titled British Costumes: An Illustrated Survey of Early Eighteenth-Century Dress in the British Isles
(Hertfordshire, 1989). All the volumes of the series were first published by William Miller of London.
Their attempt to produce a singular national character out of a diverse group of images and habits
expresses itself best in the fact that they all claim to give their readers the Costume, not costumes.
admits so much display of action and of antic as the tambourine, wherein they are
not rivaled by any performers in Europe.”2 The spare description situates the
tambourine inside a general economy of drum instruments. The accompanying
picture likewise presents its readers with a scene completely devoid of context: a
lone figure standing on a completely white background kicks backward to a
tambourine he holds over his right shoulder, a shadow emerging from his right
foot the singular and punctuating sign of a reality—a light source, a sun—outside
his body. This is the Chinese manner of playing a tambourine, and no more: no
visual sense of the world in which the tambourine is played, no sense of social
space or of the particular context in which Mason might have seen a Chinese man
playing a tambourine. The image is not, as the publisher’s preface asserts, a
portrait, which would imply that it registered some particular Chinese (or
Austrian or Russian) person. Its claims to referential access depend on how the
image and caption combine to illustrate rather than “portray” the person they
describe, placing him or her inside a textual curiosity cabinet whose introduction
to the culture, habits, and human economy of China doubles as an ethnographic
manual. In this the image, and the book series more generally, is typical of the
British in interest in collections of “types,” which in volumes like “Street Cries of
London” or “Costume of the Tirol,” “were staples of English printmakers and
publishers in this period,” and “tell us something not only about late Georgian
curiosity towards the world, but also about its urge to classify and categorise”
(CEW, 45).
The particular set of choices organizing this kind of representationality can
perhaps be clearest seen from the perspective of a counter-example: William
2
The Costume of China (London, 1800). I am citing from an edition reprinted and intercalated
with William Alexander’s The Costume of China of 1805, in Views of 18th Century China (London,
1988), 58; further references in the text are cited as CC. A book titled Costumes of China—Original
Watercolours—1800, containing the watercolors that appear in the published book, has recently been
acquired by the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. It includes a publication proposal
and newspaper article describing the book’s initial costs (a total estimated outlay of £733, and a price of
six guineas per unit, both quite high for the time), as well as a list of subscribers to its initial edition of
250 copies, which includes the names of “His Majesty’s Library and the Dukes of York, Norfolk,
Roxburgh and Northumberland and the Duchess of Devonshire,” as well as two institutions: Christ
Church College, Oxford, and the Manchester Library (Shelagh Vainker, “Costumes of China,”
Orientations 34.9 [Nov. 2003], 54.). Reprinted editions of The Costume of China from 1806, 1811, and
1821 exist at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. In 1984, Craig Clunas had identified a
volume given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1898 as the original for Mason’s book, a claim that
may have to be reevaluated in light of Vainker’s work (Chinese Export Watercolours [London, 1984],
33–42; further citations in the text are cited as CEW ).
Alexander’s The Costume of China, published in 1805.3 Like Mason, Alexander

had spent time in China, working as the official draftsman of the important 1793
British embassy to China led by Lord George Macartney. Alexander’s book thus
functions simultaneously as a historical document and an ethnographic one.4
The caption to his painting of “Three Vessels Lying at Harbor,” for instance,
opens with a paragraph on the construction of Chinese ships, but follows that
general ethnographic information with a second paragraph that tells the reader
that “The small vessel was hired for the service of the Embassy, and employed in
transporting baggage” (48). Though the relative ordering of these pieces of
information fits with the general thrust of the Costume series in which Mason’s
books were published, here the ethnographic work gives way to notes regarding
particular Chinese people, places, or events associated with Alexander’s own
3
In 1825, Alexander also published a volume entitled Picturesque Representations of the Dress and
Manners of the Chinese, which contains some of the same illustrations as his Costume of China. Notes
to editions of The Costume of the Russian Empire and The Costumes of Turkey at the Huntington
Library suggest that Alexander played an editorial role in selecting illustrations and writing captions
for both of those volumes as well.
4
Full eyewitness accounts of the 1793 embassy appear in Sir George Staunton’s An Authentic
Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (Philadelphia, 1799), which
was printed for Robert Campbell by John Bioren. See also Macartney’s own An Embassy to China; being
the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–1794 (London,
1962), which is edited with an introduction and notes by J. L. Cranmer-Byng. For readings of the 1793
embassy in the context of current theoretical arguments, and in relation to Macartney’s infamous
refusal to kowtow to the Chinese emperor, see James Hevia, Cherishing Men From Afar: Qing Guest
Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C., 1995), and chapters 2 and 3 of Lydia Liu’s The
Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, 2005). As Staunton
himself was to note in his translation of the Qing penal code, one of the major effects of the 1793
embassy in England was to undermine the largely positive vision of China promulgated by the Jesuit
missionaries of the seventeenth century:
The short residence in China of Lord Macartney’s Embassy . . . was amply sufficient to
discover that the superiority over other nations, in point of knowledge and virtue, which
the Chinese have long been accustomed to assume to themselves, and which some of their
European historians have too readily granted them, was in great measure fallacious; their
knowledge was perceived to be defective in those points in which we have, in Europe,
recently made the greatest progress
(Ta Tsing Leu Lee; Being the Fundamental Laws, and a Selection from the Supplementary Statues, of the
Penal Code of China [London, 1810; Repub. Taipei, 1966] viii–ix, which was published by T. Cadell and
W. Davies in London and by Ch’eng-Wen Publishing Co. in Taipei)
That said, Staunton goes on to suggest that had the members of the 1793 embassy spent more time in
China, they would have discovered that much of what Chinese and Europeans think of each other “was
to be imputed either to prejudice, or to misinformation; and that, upon the whole, it was not allowable
to arrogate, on either side, any violent degree of moral or physical superiority” (ix–x).
experience as a traveler in China. In portraits of specific individuals, like the one

of “Van–Ta–Zhin,” for instance, Alexander shows us a figure whose presence in
published narratives of the Embassy’s failures meant that he could not be
mistaken for just any Chinese person, even though his costume might signal
for readers the general outfit of “A military Mandarine (or Nobleman) of
China” (8).5 Unlike the images in Mason’s book, then, which functioned exclu-
sively as “types,” the paintings in Alexander’s collection operate both historically
and typologically, as representational encyclopedia and travel narrative; this is the
difference between souvenir and collection, the difference between metonymy
(“I was there”) and metaphor.6
Though Alexander’s book has the same title as Mason’s, and even the same
publisher, then, that only Mason’s book appears in the “Costumes of Various
Nations” series suggests that the representational difference between the two
books registered in the moment of publication, even as the appearance of two
separate books with the title The Costume of China within four years of each other
testifies to the intensity of British cultural interest in China in this period, an
interest sustained by the China trade in tea and porcelain, chinoiserie in architec-
ture and furnishings, and philosophical and commercial debates about Chinese
science, history, and writing.7
5
That Alexander’s Costume book features general ethnographic information at all may be
understood as an effect of the form to which the book belongs; in Staunton’s 1797 account of the
1793 embassy’s voyage, Alexander’s illustrations have, at least as far as the account itself is concerned, a
completely documentary, historical effect. Some of the illustrations in Alexander’s The Costume of
China, like “Portrait of a Solider” or “A Sea Vessel Under Sail” are so generic as to approach the
illustrative quality of the work done in Mason’s Costume, but even there, the fact that Alexander
himself painted the illustrations is enough to suggest the fact of a particular experience of China. It is
worth noting, however, that some of the paintings Alexander did of China depend on his use or re-use
of generic settings and figures. The Alexander paintings reproduced on pages 28–30 of Susan Legouix’s
Image of China, for instance, all feature the same crouching figure in slightly different contexts and
poses (Image of China: William Alexander [London, 1980].).
6
Susan Stewart:
In contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor
rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the
past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to the
past, the past lends authenticity to the collection.
(On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Durham, N.C.,
1993], 151)
7
David Porter writes that the publication between 1615 and 1625 of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s journals
detailing his time in China “inaugurated a period of two centuries in European history where significant
Returning to the typological argument of Mason’s books, one might begin to

think their organization of the relationship between reference and representation as
differing in several ways from either an “exact discourse” (recalling Edmund Scott’s
title for his account) or an “anecdote.” Rather than make a claim to reference in
particular, Mason’s images and captions make claims to reference in general,
suggesting that though this particular tambouriner, beggar, or tailor may not have
existed as such, he or she illustrates the presence in China in general of musicians,
beggars, and tailors, each of whom will more or less resemble this example. Mason’s
books are interesting, then, not simply as instantiations of particular illustrative
scenes, but as collective documents that organize for their readers an entire typology
of China, what Mason’s preface to The Costume of China refers to as the “domestic
and mechanical habits of an original and remote nation” (CC, 7).
Though the books never show particular Chinese people or events, what they
do show allows them to deduce from the referential surface of the image the
caption that will explain the image’s exemplification of a general type. Considered
inside the typological project of The Costume of China as a whole, the individual
images might be said to function like anecdotes insofar as they enable the
production of generality from particularity. In this sense of “anecdotal,” the
books’ typological work, which grounds their large-scale production of a set of
cultural truths, sustains itself by putting together image-caption pairs in which
the image functions as an ersatz anecdote in its illustration of a possible particu-
larity, while the caption urges that particular into generality, allowing the image
to become the illustration of a general practice. If the epistemological structure of
Mason’s books resembles that of the anecdote, it is because, despite a series of
major differences in the formal conventions of the books (encyclopedic and
typological) and of the anecdote proper (small and individual), the books’ overall
project depends on its marshalling of individual openings onto reference—the
images—that operate simultaneously as anecdotes and as illustrations. Even as
the image anecdotally indicates the possibility of its represented content having
been an event—the picture of some actual Chinese person’s real behavior at some
developments in linguistics, theology, the arts, and economic thought were invariably refracted through
an ever-expanding awareness of a rival civilization on the other side of the world” (Ideographia: The
Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. [Stanford, 2001], 242). The sense in which China was conceived as
a rival to northern Europe in the nineteenth century (especially in England, France, and the Netherlands)
must be understood as the crucial cultural subtext for a general interest in Chinese costume (even as that
latter interest intersects with a European epistemological drive to categorize and represent the world to
itself). As Porter notes, the nineteenth century saw a major rise in negative European attitudes toward
China; Mason’s books are in some sense on the cusp of this shift.
historical moment—it also claims to illustrate the general principle organized by

the caption, for which the actual referential truth of one particular pose or
another is of no serious consequence.
This movement between image-as-possible-anecdote and image-as-illustra-
tion can be arranged along a vector that organizes the image’s epistemological
relationship to the caption that accompanies it, with the anecdotal aspect of the
image preceding the general claim the caption makes (the caption generates its
description of general practice from the image-as-single-event), while its illustra-
tive aspect succeeds that same claim in order to exemplify the authoritative
general principle expressed in the caption. Seeing the anecdotal and the illustra-
tive aspects inside each of these individual images suggests that Mason’s books
generate their epistemological power at least partly through a continuous formal
oscillation between typology and instantiation, encyclopedia and (potential)
event, in which the deductive making-visible of a law (Chinese tambouriners
look like this) sustains itself via the simultaneous inductive presentation of an
example (here is one representative Chinese tambouriner).
2. Exceptional Punishments
I have so far said little about these two books that could not have been said about
any other book in the series; rather I have been trying to establish the performa-
tive and epistemological conventions within which Mason’s work operated. But
any theory of these conventions comes up hard against the fact that of the ten
books in the series, only one did not have the word “costume” in its title: Mason’s
1801 The Punishments of China.8 Given the typological structure of the series as a
whole, the title alone suggests that the fact of Chinese punishment was subsum-
able during the early nineteenth century under a general interest in costumes and
customs (which tells us something about the meaning of “costume” operating
here: “The custom and fashion of the time to which a scene or representation
belongs; the manner, dress, arms, furniture, and other features proper to the time
and locality in which the scene is laid.”9). That it is the only volume in the series to
operate under this larger definition of “costume,” however, directs our attention
8
The Punishments of China, Illustrated by Twenty-Two Engravings: With Explanations in England
and French (London, 1801). I cite an unpaginated 1804 edition held at the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California; further references in the text are cited as PC.
9
Oxford English Dictionary, costume, n., 1.a.
to the historical divergence between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European

and Chinese punitive codes, largely around the issue of judicial punishment and
torture. The growing European interest in “humane” modes of execution (of which
the French use of the guillotine beginning in 1792 is one example), British objections
to continental judicial torture dating back to the sixteenth century, and the radical
changes in modes of public execution and imprisonment outlined by Michel
Foucault in Discipline and Punish, were all expressions of the larger sympathetic
shift around theories of the human and the humane that made impossible
nineteenth-century state practices that had been commonplace across Europe only
decades earlier.10 By making punitive practice a feature of ethnographic knowledge,
Mason’s book expresses a generalized awareness of this shift. The fact that the
ethnographic attention in the book series focuses solely on China is, however, an
important early expression of the ecliptic cultural logic this book explores.
Within that context Punishments offers an instance of how the apparent
violation of an established thematic structure can suggest the presence behind
or underneath some apparently simple organizational principle (a series of books
on national “costumes”) of a far more complicated logic. In the Chinese case,
“costume”—a “key sign and focus of ethnographic difference” in the colonial
era—becomes a category far more complex and inclusive even than the “cos-
tumes” of the various other nations pictured in the series.11 Rather than read
10
Some measure of this change can be gathered from Victor Hugo’s unfortunately precipitous
announcement, in 1874, that “torture has ceased to exist.” Edward Peters provides a useful summary of
this transformation:
In revision after revision from 1750 on, the provisions for torture in the criminal codes of
Europe were rolled back, until by 1800 they were barely visible. Along with legislative
revision, a large literature condemning torture on both legal and moral grounds grew up
and was circulated widely. Its best-known example was Cesare Beccaria’s immensely
influential treatise On Crimes and Punishments of 1764 . . . .Torture came to bear the
brunt, and in many instances became the focal point, of much Enlightenment criticism
of the ancient régime, and indeed of the legal and moral savagery and archaism of the early
European world. (Torture [London, 1985], 74)
Ironically, of course, the European calls for the end of torture affected Europe almost exclusively,
but did not stop Europeans abroad from institutionalizing torture as a mechanism of colonial
control. Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue write that the British relied on the
argument that Chinese natives only understood the use of force to introduce punishments banned in
Britain to their colony in Hong Kong, for instance (Death by a Thousand Cuts [Cambridge, Mass.,
2008], 256n50.).
11
Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J,
2001), 92. Dirks is referring to ethnographic drawings, “pictures of ‘typical’ representatives of different
Fig 2.1 George Henry Mason and Pu Qua, The Punishments of China. “A Culprit before
a Magistrate.” Courtesy of The Huntington Library.
Punishments as the anomalous expression of British ethnography, however, in

which it would emerge against the “conscious” structure of the book series as the
return of its repressed ethnographic desire—instead of seeing the book as either
the exception to a rule (in which case it might be safely ignored in a broader
theorization of what the series means or does) or as the sole symptom of the
series’ logic (which would be to make it into the “unconscious” of the series to
which it belongs)—I wish to take it as part of the literal surface of the logic of
representation of which it takes part, as a member of the class that it helps to
produce and which, in turn, is produced partially through and by its inclusion.
Punishments opens with a plate titled “A Culprit Before a Magistrate,” repro-

duced in this text as figure 2.1, in which a man kneels in front of a desk, behind
groups, types, castes, and tribes” collected by Colin McKenzie in India in the early nineteenth century,
but the mentality he describes is appropriate to a more general epistemological project intimately
connected with imperialism. It is worth noting that Mason, who came to Canton in 1789 on doctor’s
orders to recuperate from an illness, was a “Major of Brigade to his Majesty’s forces on the coast of
Coromandel [the southeastern coast of the Indian peninsula],” and thus an intimate of the British
colonial program (Views of 18th Century China, 6n1.).
which sits the magistrate, who is accompanied right and left by assistants (the
prisoner is framed, like the magistrate, by two figures, who appear to be guards).
The second plate shows a man conveyed to prison, the third “A Culprit
Conveyed to Trial,” and the fourth, “An Offender Undergoing the Bastinade”
(being beaten with a bamboo pole). From this point forward the book shows only
punishments, which range in severity from the twisting of ears (Plate V) to the
final image showing “The Manner of Beheading,” which the caption says is
“deemed in the highest degree ignominious” and therefore “only inflicted for
crimes which are regarded by the Chinese government as the most prejudicial to
society” (Plate XXII). Though the culprits and offenders in the various images are
never visibly the same person, the book nonetheless can be seen to operate partly
along the lines of a narrative structure—trial, imprisonment, punishment—that
gives it the sense of a “beginning, middle, and end” that one might follow. Just
where this narrative breaks down, at the moment when the punishments begin to
succeed one another with no further sense of story, the ordering of the images
and captions shifts to reflect a vertical hierarchy of punishment, a Dantean ladder
of severity that offers the reader the pleasure of knowing that whatever comes
next will be slightly more spectacular than what has just preceded it. Far more
than The Costume of China, where the images succeed one another with no
apparently discernible logic (a bricklayer, a carpenter, a mandarin in his summer
dress), Punishments contextualizes its referential work inside economies of story
and progress.
This exceptionalism must be read in relation to the book’s own declared axis of
typological selection. In the preface to The Costume of China, Mason acknowl-
edged that many of his captions depended on information he had acquired from
other writers on China, including Sir George Staunton (CC, 7). In Punishments, a
year later, he also mentions his relation to those writers. But he went on to say:
Various writers have mentioned other punishments, in addition to those

represented in this publication, of a much severer nature, which have been
inflicted by the Chinese upon criminals, convicted of regicide, parricide,
rebellion, treason, or sedition; but drawings, or even verbal descriptions, of
these would be committing an indecorous violence on the feelings, and
inducing us to arraign the temperance and wisdom, so universally ac-
knowledged in the government of China. (PC preface)
The Punishments of China thus begins with a statement of its own incomplete-
ness, an acknowledgment that the narrative and typological structure that orga-
nizes it could be extended beyond “The Manner of Beheading” to punishments
“of a much severer nature” that it will not show. While the book neither describes
nor depicts the punishments, however, its invocation of the possibility of depic-
tion—it could, remember, have said nothing about these absent illustrations—
seems to respond both to a desire for comprehensiveness (shouldn’t a book called
The Punishments of China theoretically include all the punishments and not just a
limited selection?) as well as the need to perform its own sense of decorum within
a British context in which such pictures might do violence to feelings, and in
which China’s temperance ought to be “universally acknowledged.”
This has complicated effects on the book’s narrative organization. Its unre-
presentability is, after all, not simply the unrepresentability of a limited text.
Though in the costume book not everything of China is shown (and how could it
be?), the representational claim there attempts to indicate a set of possibilities or
limits from which one might deduce the unrepresented remainder: if a Chinese
baker looks like this, and a butcher looks like that, well, then, the candlestick
maker probably looks like something in between. So also with sailing ships and
wheeled carts. But because Punishments explicitly locates the unrepresentable
material in a “beyond” or “in addition to” the punishments it represents, it leaves
the reader to imagine an unrepresentable outside to the typological circle traced
by the book itself, as though the story were missing its ending, as though the axis
of punishment extended infinitely beyond the book’s limit, asymptote to some
Platonically punitive sublime.
If the exceptionality of this moment is not to undermine the project of the
series as a whole, it must be thought as a continuation of the typological work
done there; imagine that Mason has written an encyclopedia whose final chapter
consisted of a page announcing that the final chapter was missing, or produced a
list that, pace Borges, who imagined this as an entry in a Chinese encyclopedia,
includes as its final element “those not included in the classification.”12 That is, it
must be considered within the broader framework of the books in which it
appears as a gesture made within a larger economy of exposure and concealment,
described explicitly, as it is here, as a salute to international or intercultural
generosity and understanding.
12
Jorge Luis Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia lives on as one of the major initial figures of Michel
Foucault’s The Order of Things, and subsequently has come to figure a certain European relation to
both China and modes of classification. For a longer discussion of the encyclopedia’s role in the
production of postwar French interest in China, see the introduction of Zhang Longxi’s Mighty
Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998).
The irony of that gesture stems from the fact that by declaring his respect for
Chinese temperance—and therefore by tempering the complete picture of China’s
punishments—Mason opens the possibility that the Chinese are not that temper-
ate after all. Saying you don’t wish to judge someone implies that there is
something there to be judged. Mason writes that to include images or descriptions
of the severest punishments would be to “arraign the temperance and wisdom”
acknowledged in the Chinese government. The French translation of “arraign”
(the book appeared in a bilingual English and French edition) as faire le procès, to
bring to trial, recalls the word’s literal valence: the announcement that China is not
on trial is an announcement that China is on trial. The book narrates a trial, and it
is a trial, the content and the form approaching one another along the figural limit
of the word “adjudication.” The conclusion readers should draw from the book’s
captions and illustrations, Mason goes on to say, has to do not so much with their
“novelty and information,” but rather from the “sensation of security which they
produce in those bosoms that heave upon a tract of the globe, where they are
protected from being torn by lengthened agonies; where a person’s innocence is
not estimated by his mental or corporeal powers of enduring pain,” and so on
(PC, preface). The Punishments of China’s typological study of the Chinese judicial
system (already vaguely mislabeled, then, as a list of “punishments,” though
certainly the book works that way as well) becomes at least in the preface not
simply an illustration of the novelty of cultural otherness but also a cross-cultural
judgment narrated as an allegory of the material it contains, a trial in which the
most damning evidence is damning precisely because the text excludes it.
This alone gives a literary critic plenty to work with. But it turns out that the
arrangements of Mason’s books are even stranger, as is indicated by this extraor-
dinary fact: in the caption to an image in Mason’s The Costume of China, printed
a year earlier than Punishments, one finds described precisely those punishments
that Mason does not include in the later book! Below is the caption that
accompanies “A Puppet-Show,” which is reproduced as figure 2.2:
A person mounted on a toll, and concealed as far as the ankles with a

covering of blue calico, causes some very small puppets to perform a kind
of play, the box at the top representing a stage. The little figures are made
to move with much grace and decorum, on which account the Chinese
puppet-show is rendered equally innocent as trifling, and may be pre-
sented without endangering the purity of the infant mind.
The Chinese youth receive the earliest impressions of virtue and filial
obedience; these precepts prevent their incurring the penalties prescribed
Fig 2.2 George Henry

Mason and Pu Qua, The
Costume of China. “A
Puppet-Show.” Courtesy
of The Huntington
Library.
in the code of laws of that empire against such ‘degenerate vipers’* as shall
dare to violate any of those sacred ties which GOD and Nature have framed
to attach them to the authors of their existence. The son, or grandson, of a
Chinese, who is deficient in his duty towards his father or mother, grand-
father, or grandmother, is condemned by the law to receive one hundred
blows of a bamboo; if he gives them abusive language, he is strangled; if he
lifts his hand against them, he is beheaded; and if he wounds or maims
them, his flesh is torn from his bones with red-hot pincers, and he is cut
into a thousand pieces. It is also conjectured that the stability and unifor-
mity of the Chinese character—immutable for the known duration of four
thousand years—it [sic] is supported solely by that progressive submission
which rises, gradually, from the bosom of a family even to the throne.
*See Shakespeare’s Lear. (158)
The material from “if he wounds or maims them” forward, which describes the
punishment now widely known (or imagined) as the “death by a thousand cuts,” is
exactly what becomes unrepresentable a year later, and becomes there the subject of
Mason’s claim that “Various writers” had discussed it. This unrepresentable punish-
ment is known in Chinese as lingchi chusi. Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and
Gregory Blue describe it as a form of “tormented execution” involving the methodi-
cal cutting apart of the body of the convicted prisoner. As they show, lingchi became
notorious not simply because it marked the extreme case of Chinese judicial
punishment but also because its representations—particularly its photographic
representations—coincided with an international political context that turned
“China into a museum of all that Europe had left behind, a Pandora’s box of leftover
images” that helped give “the imperialist West the justification it sought to prove
that it had to act in China.”13 In the early twentieth century, photographs of the last
few lingchi executions circulated widely between China and Europe, all of them
taken in a brief span of time between the development of convenient portable
photography and the Qing government’s banning of lingchi in 1905, as Brook et al.
note. Mason’s reference to the punishment in The Costume of China can be thought
of as an early indicator of the West’s eventual interest in it, as well as a reflection of
the comparatively more positive cultural view of China held by most Europeans at
the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Presumably it is the protected “infant mind” of the end of the first paragraph
of the caption to “A Puppet-Show” that leads Mason metonymically into the
“Chinese youth” of the second, though the general logic that would authorize that
movement is hard to parse. The caption presents this information about Chinese
judicial punishment in the context of a performance intended for the edification
of children. The footnote to King Lear allows Mason to translate the show’s
pedagogical performance into an English context, where the phrase “degenerate
viper,” which Lear directs at Goneril, makes his betrayal explicitly generational.14
13
Brook et al., 28. See their third chapter for a developmental history of lingchi in China; see
171–74 for a brief discussion of Mason’s Punishments. I discuss the famous photograph of lingchi
owned and reproduced by Georges Bataille at length in chapter 6; Brook et al. do so in chapter 8 of
their book. On Chinese judicial torture more generally, see Bourgon, Supplices chinois (Brussels, 2007),
and Antonio Dominguez Leiva and Muriel Détrie, Le Supplice Oriental dans la littérature et les arts
(Neuilly-les-Dijon, 2005).
14
The King Lear variorum shows no instances of “degenerate viper”; it is likely that Mason is
citing Nahum Tate’s revised and adapted version of the play, with which the eighteenth century was far
more familiar than the original. Shakespeare’s line is “Degenerate bastard! I’ll not trouble thee” (I, iv);
Tate rewrites this as: “Degenerate viper, I’ll not stay with Thee” (The History of King Lear, in
Shakespeare Adaptations: The Tempest, The Mock Tempest, and King Lear, ed. Montague Summers
[Boston, 1922], 190.). That the original is “bastard” reinforces the sense that what is at stake is the
failure of filiation to regenerate itself as filiality.
Lear’s major plotline revolves around the legal structure of inheritance and the
failure of children to refrain from becoming “degenerate vipers,” or rather the
failure of the legal force embodied in the king (or the generative life–force of the
father) to keep them from doing so. The reference thus moves Mason from praise
for the pedagogical mode of the Chinese puppet show, which protects innocent
minds from dangerous ideas, to the indirect suggestion that the public apparatus
of Chinese punishment performs a set of consequences for unfilial behavior
designed to discourage future Gonerils and Regans.15
The Chinese puppet show thus stands in for both the modesty of one particular
mode of public performance for children and for a correspondingly spectacular
form of public punishment, each of them directed, in Mason’s caption, toward the
improvement of children, or rather, toward the location of children in a hierarchy
of interpersonal engagement and pedagogical modesty (the “infant mind” must
remain properly pure). Since the improvement of Chinese children connects
directly, as Mason suggests, to the development of a more general filial piety
that forms the bedrock of all Chinese social relations and indeed of all Chinese
history, it makes sense that the puppet show’s lone observer would be an adult.
Though he cannot be, at least according to Mason’s caption, the proper audience
for a puppet show designed for children, his presence suggests the degree to which
the importance of the education of the child in his or her role as child (relative to
parents, grandparents, ancestors, or the emperor) remains a feature of the
adult Chinese person. In the context of Mason’s warmed-over Confucianism,
the adult Chinese person, and through him, China itself, is as much the historical
addressee of this particular performance as any child could be.
Rather than argue that the description of these punishments is somehow
strangely mis-placed here from its proper location in the punishments book, or
that Mason must have changed his mind about the decorousness of these
descriptions between 1800 and 1801, I would like to suggest that the descriptions
of “more severe” punishments are here dis-placed, in the Freudian sense of the
term,16 that is, that their presence here does not indicate a mistake but rather
15
Remember that an insane Lear, in the farmhouse scene of Act III, does in fact put his two
daughters on trial. In his madness, he asks that Regan be dissected for evidence of treachery: “Then let
them anatomize Regan; see what breeds / about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that / makes
these hard hearts?” (III, vi). But the trial, like the dissection (itself a kind of cutting into a thousand
pieces), is imaginary, by contrast to the actually staged punishments of China, as Mason seems to be
suggesting.
16
In Freud’s work, “condensation,” “displacement,” and “symbolization” are the three of major
figures of dream work. Displacement has often been compared to metaphor, since both have to do
points toward the logic or organization that is proper to the books as they stand.
The fact that the missing “beyond” of the Punishments book appears a year prior
to its remarked absence in an entry on puppet shows must be understood as part
of rather than an exception to the logic of the two books.17
What all this suggests for a broader understanding of the books’ typological
work in relation to Chinese judicial punishment is, beyond the general observa-
tion of the manner in which the texts combine to link punishment, performance,
the status of adult and child, and the myth of Chinese immutability, fairly
complicated. Following the trail to one more image-caption pair should, howev-
er, allow for at least a temporary summing up.
Late in The Costume of China, the reader comes across the picture of a man
sitting on the ground, looking to his left with his legs out in front of him, knees
bent upward, with tears in the fabric of his shirt. The plate, titled “A Lame
Beggar,” is reproduced in this text as figure 2.3.
Though the man in the image is not visibly crippled, the caption refers
immediately to his lameness:
Probably not born so, nor judicially afflicted with this calamity by Heaven
in his maturer age; but caused by his own parents, who crippled him
designedly, in order that he might become an extraordinary object of pity;
this practice being reported (perhaps by Calumny, the genius of distor-
tion) to be not very uncommon with the lowest order of Chinese.
The unpleasant sensation which this object may at first excite will be
materially dissipated by the consideration that all instances of natural
deformity, be it of limb or feature, are so very rare among the populous
nations of the eastern world, as to attract universal astonishment whenever
they are presented to the view.
It will be observed that the countenances of the four mendicants
represented in this work are particularly characteristic.
with a carrying across of meaning from one place to another. Unlike metaphor, however, which tends
to organize its displacements vertically from one realm of meaning to another (my love is a rose, for
instance), “displacement” allows me here to suggest the degree to which this transfer occurs horizon-
tally, within the text’s own plane of self-understanding, rather than as a gesture to a completely
incompatible (and therefore potentially unconscious) register of meaning.
17
Such a reading gains comfort from the movement of the crucial cognate “decorum” from the
caption to “A Puppet-Show” (“the little figures are made to move with much grace and decorum”) to
Mason’s claim, in the 1801 preface, that to include the extreme descriptions “would be committing an
indecorous violence on the feelings” of his readers.
Fig 2.3 George Henry

Mason and Pu Qua, The
Costume of China. “A
Lame Beggar.” Courtesy of
The Huntington Library.
In the face of the Beggar with his Dog, misery and low artifice are
apparent; in the aspect of the man with a Serpent, reluctance and self-
disgust are visible; the features of the Beggar with a Monkey are expressive
of softness supplicating compassion; and in the visage of this Cripple, pain
and wretchedness are most forcibly delineated. (220)
Far more startling for me than the evocation of a sympathetic pain in relation
to the image of a Chinese person is the typological intensity of the frame this
caption establishes. The images of the four mendicants in the The Costume of
China are “particularly characteristic,” it argues, but the characteristicness has not
so much to do with the variety of Chinese beggars as it does with the general
typology of begging, divided here into a number of apparently universal aspects
which find themselves expressed in these four images. At this point, more than
anywhere else in Mason’s two books, one feels an encyclopedic drive overpower-
ing what one imagines as the images “themselves,” that is, the images considered
outside of the production (and reproduction) of ethnic typology that organizes
them. In such a context, the redundancy in the phrase “particularly characteristic”
suggests that the typicalness of the typical has been in play more than the text
would like to admit.18
18
The sudden and somewhat belated appearance of this explicitly typological frame, just two
pages from the end of the Costume volume, is the only moment of its type in either book. It presents its
reader with a map of the general program of the “Costumes of Various Nations” series, namely the
Considering the typological work done by “A Lame Beggar” in the context of

the initially surprising appearance of the “more extreme” punishments in the The
Costume of China’s puppet show entry (rather than in the Punishments book itself,
where one might have expected them), one might begin to say that the typologi-
cal structure of Mason’s work seems unusually connected to its presentation of
judicial punishment and readerly sympathy, now finally visible along two major
lines. First, the typological gap or failure of the Punishments book (1801), an-
nounced so clearly in its preface, seems to have been resolved in advance in The
Costume of China (published a year earlier) inside a caption that explicitly
connects the punishments deemed too indecorous for the second book to an
explanation of the Confucian roots of Chinese filial piety, and remarks on the
importance of public performances that reinforce them. And second, the general
typological project of both books reaches its most “particularly characteristic”
representations in a moment in which the reader’s attention is drawn toward but
then pushed away from a sympathetic identification with an apparently deliberate
physical violence—the only moment in either book in which the reader is asked
to notice the suffering of a particular person at all—that has been inflicted by
parents on their child. The caption’s reluctance to declare absolutely that this man
has been crippled by his parents—you see it in the phrase “Probably not born so,”
the nod to Calumny and rumor, and the litotes of its assertion (the practice is
“not very uncommon with the lowest order of Chinese”)—suggest something of
the rhetorical intensity that surrounds the claim it makes and, thus, something
of its importance to the general work of these two books.
Let me draw some of these strands together. Though the violence done to the
lame beggar depends in part on his family’s poverty, the sheer fact of his being
“crippled designedly” by his parents makes the juridical origin of that violence the
same contract between parent and child that Mason reads, in the puppet show
entry, as the legal foundation of all Chinese history and behavior (he is probably
encyclopedic characterization of a people for those who “wish to be informed respecting the individ-
ual manner, the external appearance, and the general character of different countries,” as the publish-
er’s preface to British Costumes has it (Pyne, ii). (It is precisely the movement from “individual
manner” to “external appearance” to “general character” that defines the books’ epistemological
ambitions.) The caption to “A Lame Beggar,” by reframing the three earlier pictures of mendicants
as members of a group of four (which is not at all obvious—given the titles of the plates, the reader
would be justified in not having connected the “Man With a Serpent” to the “Lame Beggar” at all) and
suggesting that each member of that series represents one quarter of the sum total of mendicancy’s
aspects, expresses the representational and epistemological archetype of the entire costume-book
project.
not, Mason says, “judicially afflicted with this calamity by Heaven”). That is, the
logic whereby the parents cripple the child in order to make it economically
productive depends on the assertion that its body is theirs to cripple, and thus on
a sense that the ownership of a person’s physical body has been subordinated to a
larger filial structure in which the body belongs, even in its most intimate
functionings, to someone located outside the “self ” that nominally governs it.19
The beggar’s body thus testifies, thanks entirely to the caption that describes it, to
the presence of the same filial rules Mason finds reinforced by the public perfor-
mance of judicial punishments in China. The exclusion of the “more extreme”
punishments from the Punishments book omits those punishments specifically
reserved for high crimes against filiation; a year earlier, in The Costume of China,
the question of filiation (and of cultural child-rearing more broadly) has
organized itself around two forms of pedagogical performance: the verbal de-
scription of judicial punishments whose performative aspect expresses itself most
vividly in the image of the adult watching the “Puppet–Show,” and a singular,
typologically extravagant instance of “pain and wretchedness . . . most forcibly
delineated” on the body of a man whose pain and wretchedness the text attributes
speculatively, hesitantly, with a nod to “the genius of distortion,” to his deliberate
crippling by his parents.
Is not, then, one might ask, the beggar’s public begging, in which he becomes
“an extra-ordinary object of pity,” a kind of performance not simply of his own
“crippled” body but of his submission to a set of social hierarchies that are the
original cause and justification of that crippling? And is not, equally, his lameness
a kind of punishment of China justified and enabled by the hierarchical mechanism
19
This is not to suggest that in Europe or the Americas no limitations existed on bodily self-
governance, since both slavery and the continued exploitation of women depended on just such a
system (which functioned in both economic and juridical terms). For more on the relation between
governance and bodies (including the body politic), see Steven Bruhm, “Aesthetics and Anesthetics at
the Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 32.3 (Fall 1993). I wonder if what strikes Mason as remarkable
in this caption—so remarkable that he has to communicate this rumor, even as he acknowledges it
may not be true in general or in the case of this beggar—is that the violence is permanent and occurs
across the parent-child barrier. Given shifting relationships to the notion of childhood in late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, and the uneven distribution of those relationships
across geography, race, gender, class, and individual, it is of course impossible to know. A book is
waiting to be written on the ways in which an increased European attention to childhood,
corresponding to a growing sense of the importance of an individual human being as life to be
protected and cared for, interacted with the broader development of European imperialism and the
West’s ongoing interventions into other cultures in the name of the children of those cultures and of
human rights in general. This book traces one aspect of the latter part of that historical complex.
of filial piety whose most public maintenance is done by the system of judicial
violence Mason incompletely delineates?
3. English Writing, “Chinese” Pictures
The illustrations in Mason’s two books, unlike those in Alexander’s 1805 The
Costume of China, were not done by their editor. Small captions beneath the
paintings read “Pu Qua, Canton, Delin.” In the preface to the Costume book,
Mason writes that he “obtained correct drawings of the Chinese in their respective
habits and occupations; the itinerant mechanics and handicraftsmen, in particu-
lar; fac-similes of which are exhibited on the subsequent pages. Not intended,
originally, for public inspection, they are thus, at the insistence of some learned
and ingenious friends, issued from his portfolio after ten years privacy” (7).
Though the authenticity of the images is assured at the cultural level by virtue of
their being painted by a Chinese person—and even more by Mason’s insistence
that they were designed to be private—they lose some of the indexical force of the
portraits and landscapes in Alexander’s Costume volume, each of which commu-
nicates, beyond the specificities of its content, the author’s past presence at the site
of portraiture. The difference between Alexander’s portraits, or even the paintings
in The Costume of Great Britain, all of which belong firmly to a European painterly
tradition, and the background-less illustrations of Mason’s two China volumes
means that the paintings in Mason’s books signified more than their simple
referential content: they also exemplified some version of “Chinese painting.”
But the paintings were not exactly Chinese, either. From the earliest days of the
European China trade, China produced materials especially for export, generating
porcelain patterns and even flavors of tea according to European demands and the
specifications of expert tasters from the East India companies.20 These products did
not reflect, as their purchasers often assumed, Chinese aesthetic norms, but occu-
pied instead a middle ground in which a set of aesthetic demands communicated
20
On eighteenth-century anxieties about Chinese trade goods, especially porcelain, see Lydia
Liu’s “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” and the third chapter of Porter’s Ideographia; for a general
overview of the China trade in artistic goods see Carl L. Crossman, The China Trade: Export Paintings,
Furniture, Silver and other Objects (Princeton, N. J., 1972). As for tea, Jack Beecham writes that by 1785,
the British East India Company was “buying and selling fifteen million pounds’ weight of China tea
per year,” a figure that rose to thirty million pounds by 1830; at one time, he writes, “the tea tax
provided a tenth of the British government’s entire revenue” (The Chinese Opium Wars [London,
1975], 19, 29.).
through traders and marketing agents on both sides emerged through Chinese
aesthetic and commercial practice for sale and exchange in Europe.21 The China
trade’s production of goods for sale in Europe thus constitutes an early example of
the figural work of a global economy in which trade goods functioned as cultural
representations of their apparent origins, not only at the material level of the goods
themselves (China is the land of tea and spices), but also as a series of representa-
tional surfaces on which were painted Chinese villages, people, and landscapes. After
paper, porcelain may have been the eighteenth century’s most common representa-
tional medium, one whose ambitions connected only marginally to the actual
representational surface of China, but which nonetheless provided armchair
travelers with a set of powerfully mediatized and mercantilized images of China
itself.22 That these images were from very early on produced in correspondence with
the representational demands of European and American export brokers means that
what they represented was never the authentic China it purported to be. As Craig
Clunas writes, “Whatever the customer may have thought, he was not buying a piece
of reportage, an accurate picture of the Chinese interior he was forbidden to
penetrate. Nor was he buying a product of the Chinese imagination. Rather he
was receiving his own preconceptions . . . reflected back at him by an artist whose
sole concern was to please” (CEW, 25). The representational work done by porcelain
(whose products were so often used to consume that other great Chinese product,
tea, in a wonderful mise-en-abyme23) establishes a framework for understanding
21
Margaret Jourdain and R. Soame Jenyns capture some of the combination of economic
calculation and benevolent racism behind this trade by writing (in 1950) that “The Chinese took
kindly to the imitation of models that came to them from foreign parts, and made ‘expressly for
Europeans articles adapted to their taste, and images in china, steatite and painted wood are made so
cheaply among them that there might often be economy in getting them from China’” (Chinese Export
Art in the Eighteenth Century [London, 1950], 13.). Their citation is from Evariste Régis Huc’s 1854
L’Empire Chinois. The notion that Chinese people are good at imitating but not creating is a feature of
anti-Chinese racism (some of it produced in China in the mode of self-critique) to this day.
22
Armchair travelers, but also real travelers: consider in this context a sentence from John Bell’s
A Journey From St. Petersburg to Pekin, 1719–22 (pub. 1763): “In the cliffs of the rocks you see little
scattered cottages, with spots of cultivated ground, much resembling those romantick figures of
landskips which are painted on the China-ware and other manufactures of this country. These are
accounted fanciful by most Europeans, but are really natural” (117). The sentence indicates the
presence of some common discourse in Europe, even in the early 1700s, about the possible representa-
tional truth of China-ware. But Bell’s claim that the landscapes he sees “are really natural” also suggests
the degree to which any particular experience of China could arrive in China already prepared to see
certain kinds of vistas, to find them “natural” and therefore real.
23
A pairing admirably condensed by Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock: “From silver Spouts the
grateful Liquors glide, / And China’s earth receives the smoking Tyde” (3.109–110).
the meaning and value of Chinese export painting. Though watercolors were
not especially valuable as commodities,24 largely because the Chinese had no
technological advantage in their manufacture, their production and trade operated
along lines similar to that of the porcelain industry, with paintings produced to
European standards by groups of artisans working under the direction of a master
artist. The “high degree of division of labour in Chinese craft production generally,
of which porcelain kilns at Jingdezhen were the most extreme example, . . . is hardly
surprising, but it can hardly be over-emphasized,” largely because it allows us to
disconnect from European notions of genius and the single artist the commercial
and mediatic context within which painters like Pu Qua operated (CEW, 73). Even
the artist’s name indicates the transnational context in which the paintings were
produced: “Pu Qua” is not an actual Chinese name, but the product of a naming
convention developed by Europeans in and around Canton, who tended to add the
suffix “qua” to the names of Chinese merchants and painters.25 In this sense, the “Pu
Qua” written in alphabetic script at the bottom of the images in Costume and
Punishments is another mark of the economic context from which the paintings
emerged, and a lure likely to be read by British readers as a personal signature rather
than a brand name.26
Clunas has found, in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a loose set of
one hundred prints he believes to be the original images from which Mason drew
the images for The Costume of China. Using watermarks, he has dated the
collection to between 1780 and 1790, making it quite possible that this set of
24
Jourdain and Jenyns describe the relative value of painting to such goods as silk embroidery,
lacquered furniture, and porcelain: “In the case of paintings on glass and paper-hangings their brilliant
colour and fantasy ensured a wide demand, but the art of China was measured by European standards.
The realistic representation of birds and flowers was accepted from the late years of the seventeenth
century. . . . But the representation of the human form was considered to be ‘a high burlesque’ and
‘either hideous or ludicrous’” (15).
25
The most famous person so suffixed was Howqua, or Wu Bingjian, the leading light of the
Chinese merchant community in Canton. Craig Clunas finds no adequate explanation for the
emergence of this suffix, which was represented in some paintings by “one of two characters
pronounced gua which are otherwise meaningless and serve only to convey the sound.” He concludes:
“It seems likely that the -qua names whatever their origin (and they are seen already in early
eighteenth-century documents) were simply a form of name somehow fixed to Chinese merchants
and artists by Europeans and used only in intercourse with Europeans” (83).
26
Pu Qua’s status as an artist is reinforced on these pages by the work’s dual “signatures.” “Pu
Qua, Canton, Delin.,” and “Dadley: London, Sculpt” reflect a tradition in which an artist delineavit
(has drawn) while an artisan sculpsit (engraved) the image. That said, Jourdain and Jenyns describe
export watercolors in general as “never signed as they are the work of artisans” (31).
images was brought back by Mason from Canton.27 For my purposes here,
whether or not these images came back from China with Mason does not matter
as much as the fact that they were sold as a set. Clunas’s work on export water-
colors shows that they were almost always sold in bound formats or loose sets that
gathered together a variety of images (even images from different sources, in
some cases), meaning that the images Mason “obtained” were likely purchased
from one of several workshops catering to the foreign trade in watercolor depic-
tions of China as a set designed to do the very representational work that they
would perform in his Costume book of 1800. That is, the same European episte-
mological structure that made the book of types so popular in late Georgian
England was the generating force behind the work of Pu Qua’s studio and the
production of this type of image generally, making Europe just as much an origin
of the Pu Qua paintings as Pu Qua’s studio itself. As Brook et al. remark, “Chinese
watercolor artists quickly learned what would sell and happily allowed European
aesthetic and moral tastes to determine what ‘China’ should look like—indeed, to
determine what aspects of Chinese life should be judged visually appropriate or
desirable.”28 From this perspective Mason’s claim that the images were “Not
intended, originally, for public inspection” can refer only to his state of mind
when he purchased them.
As for the paintings’ aesthetic qualities, a quick sense of their intermediacy can be
gathered by comparing them to either the paintings in Alexander’s costume book, or
to any Chinese figure painting of the same era. In particular, the Chinese convention
of showing distance by placing things higher in the frame seems—if one looks back
at the opening image of Punishments, figure 2.1, above—to have been transformed
through some hybridized mixture with European laws of perspective, even as the
habit of a blank background retains something aesthetically Chinese. This mixed
strategy, like that of much of Chinese export ware, “occupies a space which is neither
wholly Chinese nor wholly European” (CEW, 11). If the nature of these compromises
can “tell us a lot about how one culture saw the other in the age before photography”
27
Though this is now possibly under dispute—see the discussion of Vainker’s work in footnote 3.
The paintings are on British paper. Paintings on “rice paper” (which does not come from rice but from
pith, known in Chinese as tongcao [medulla Tetrapanacis]—see the discussion in Clunas 77–80) were
also sold as export goods. Jourdain and Jenyns speculate that part of their attractiveness lay in its
“velvet surface,” which was “likely to appeal to the decorators of Cantonese enamel and porcelain” (31).
But the appeal of surface may have functioned in Europe as well, perhaps as a part of a kind of
phenomenologics of Chineseness whose major attribute was to be simultaneously smooth, opaque,
and reflective.
28
Brook et al., 25.
(CEW, 11), it is because the intersection between a set of representational demands

and the practices that met them indicate, through the sheer materiality of the
representational objects themselves, both the commercial power exerted by the
European China trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, by virtue
of the representational struggles around the objects as they appear in Mason’s books,
something of the problem of “translation” across aesthetic and epistemological
categories that characterizes every cross-cultural relationship.29
What all this suggests is that the illustrations that accompany Mason’s two
books depend only partially on his control of the representations they give. This is
true not simply because he himself did not paint them, or because he seems at
least on one occasion unable to direct (or to recall his directions for) what the
images represent at all,30 but largely because the manner of representation was
incompatible with contemporary habits of European portrait painting. The
typological work Pu Qua’s paintings do, then, depends at least partly on the
kind of image they are, especially when it comes to the total absence of contextual
background; in Alexander’s book or in Pyne’s British Costumes, the figures in the
foreground have their referential force sustained at least partly by the landscaped
backgrounds in which they occur, above all when those backgrounds feature
other, smaller figures that place the foregrounded subject in a social and anthro-
pological context. The difference between the images in Mason’s books and those
of the rest of the series means that in Punishments and The Costume of China, the
epistemological vacillation between caption and illustration, already present in
the other books, can be understood as an effect generated not solely by the book’s
form (its pairing of images and explanations) but also by its mode of production,
with Mason struggling to put into words his own interpretation of an image that
emerges from a different aesthetic and cultural context than his own, and with
which he sometimes—as in the instance of the “Lame Beggar”—appears to be in
conflict. At the same time, each of Pu Qua’s paintings functions, no matter how
much it resists its caption, or how much it emerges from the commercial
demands of a European aesthetic, as an instance of Chinese art. It thus commu-
29
Indeed, Vainker refers to a list of expenses to the publisher, William Miller, which includes a
payment to Thomas Stodhart for “correcting five drawings” in the collection. The published drawings
“in many cases show more shading and modelling than the originals,” which leads Vainker to suggest
that the printed versions have “undergone two stages of Westernisation,” the first when they were
made by Pu Qua’s workshop, the second when they were corrected by Stodhart (53).
30
Mason comments on the illustration for Plate XVIII of Punishments that “This plate appears to
represent a section of the cage described in Plate XV,” which hints at the degree to which his captions
were always interpretive.
nicates at the formal level some notion of cultural “costume” or custom regard-
less of what specifically it shows.31
A reading of the relationship between caption and image in Mason’s two books
will therefore have to account for the books’ hybrid provenance, the degree to
which their representational material speaks to the difference between its two
intertwined sources, and to the difference between the mode of production of the
paintings in Canton and the mode of production of the books in London, a
difference captured nicely by Mason’s elision of the distinction between his role as
customer or tourist in the Chinese context and the degree to which the books
establish him as a patron in a European one. These differences seem very much
behind the interpretive struggle of the captions to respond to images which,
though their origin very much lies in Mason’s Europe, nonetheless appear at
times to yield only reluctantly to his interpretation (or, worse, yield the “wrong”
interpretation).
It would be fun to read this interaction between English writing and Chinese
pictures as an allegory of the eighteenth century’s struggle over the proper hierar-
chy of alphabet and ideogram, in which Chinese writing first seemed (in Leibniz,
for instance) to offer up a model for divine script before becoming one more piece
of evidence for Chinese stagnation.32 But such a reading makes the books too
exclusively the site of a binary cultural battleground, too much a reprise of the old
imperialist agon, and falls too quickly into the longstanding theoretical lure of
distinguishing images sharply from texts, when in fact “there are no ‘purely’ visual
or verbal arts.”33 It thus fails to recognize the degree to which Pu Qua’s paintings
do not emerge from some authentically Chinese space outside the world of
31
Such a “custom” would likely have registered for most of Mason’s readers as “primitive,” as this
summary of the state of Chinese painting, published in John Barrow’s 1804 Travels in China, suggests:
“With regard to painting, [the Chinese] can be considered in no other light than as miserable daubers,
being unable to pencil out a correct outline of many objects, to give body to the same by the
application of proper lights and shadows, and to lay on the nice shades of colour, so as to resemble
the tints of nature” (Clunas, CEW, 96). Barrow’s use of “no other light” in relation to his complaint
about “the proper application of lights and shadows” is another neat mise-en-abyme, in which the
representational figure he uses to describe his portrayal of the Chinese is also the literal representa-
tional practice he says they cannot master.
32
For particular instances of this struggle, see Haun Saussy’s Great Walls of Discourse and Other
Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, 2002), Zhang Longxi’s The Tao and the Logos: Literary
Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham, N.C., 1992), and Liu’s The Clash of Empires, among many
others. The most exciting recent theorization of Western concepts of the ideograph appears in
Christopher Bush’s Ideographic Modernism, forthcoming 2011.
33
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), 5.
European mercantilism, but actually testify—as does Mason’s career as a soldier in

a British regiment in India—to the forms of interaction that come from inside the
historical context to which Pu Qua belonged, in which his desire to produce
images that would sell well to Western visitors meant that he had, perhaps, a
richer and more developed sense of what Mason “wanted” from his pictures than
did Mason himself.34 And it fails to recognize that whatever produces the images
in Mason’s book does so in terms of a series of complex interactions with the
accompanying texts and paratexts (and in which those texts themselves “‘incor-
porate’ pictorial practices.”35). Pu Qua’s participation in the narrative and refer-
ential complexity of these two books, then, does not so much dislocate a smooth
and established trajectory as re–dislocate the already swollen hinges of their
jointure, allowing us to read on the surface of the text more of the formal,
historical, and interpretive problems whose scars it already bears. “Pu Qua,” in
this sense, is both a name for the difference the text produces in the mode of its
own self-production as a material object and the name of a particular historical
person whose actual participation in the production of Punishments can be read as
both a cause of its complex written relation to its own images—and as an effect of
the global history necessary to create it in the first place.
4. The Compassion Trade
It remains then to explain the particular eventfulness of the narrative–logical

trajectory that moves from the preface to Punishments to the images of the “Lame
34
Writing in 1810, Staunton suggested that the watercolors were historically inaccurate, saying of
the illustrations in Mason’s book that “the fancy of the painter has given, in some instances, a
representation of cruelties, and of barbarous executions, which it would be very erroneous to suppose
have a place in the ordinary course of justice, although something of such a nature may, no doubt,
have been practiced heretofore under some tyrannical and sanguinary Emperors; and even perhaps
in the present age, upon some particular and extraordinary circumstances” (Ta Tsing xxvi–xxvii). In
general, Staunton in his preface is interested in presenting the Chinese penal code as rational in
relation to the Chinese situation; where “the laws have not in any considerable degree, the active
concurrence, either of a sense of honor, or of a sense of religion,” it makes sense that they should
include a wide range of possible punishments, including severe ones (xxvii). Staunton’s relatively
moderated (though clearly culturally particular) take on the Chinese penal code is very much aware of
its taking place in relation to a set of developing cultural stereotypes about Chinese cruelty, of which
Mason’s book was only one instance; that Staunton’s side “lost” the debate can be judged from the
wide and ongoing presence of the stereotype.
35
Mitchell, 4.
Beggar” and the “Puppet-Show” published in The Costume of China, now consid-
ered as an act within a broader framework of knowledge-production, mediatic
representation, and commercial exchange that includes the relation between caption
and image, Mason and Pu Qua, England and China.36 In calling that trajectory
“eventful,” I wish to suggest the degree to which it escapes, or seems to escape, the
convention that organizes the books as a whole.37 And by “event,” I mean, in turn,
that which remains inside the convention even as it escapes it, allowing it to be
thought of as a form of “surprise” outside the parameters of the convention itself,
and as a possibility whose production outside the convention’s own self-regarding
optic constitutes part of its ontological framework.38 The event is what breaks the
surface of the convention, makes it differ from itself, even as it continues to gain its
significance from the convention that is its ground.
That the sequence that carries us from the 1801 preface to “A Puppet-Show” to
“A Lame Beggar” escapes in several important ways the formal and thematic
conventions established by these two books and by the series to which they belong
is by now, I hope, quite clear. That this escape is very much a patent feature of the
book’s own self-regard (as exemplified by the 1801 preface), that the escape is at
once concealed by the texts, which do not address it directly, and also placed by
36
The history of “caption,” which shares a Latin root with “capture,” is instructive: the OED gives
usage examples from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in which “caption”
functions as a legal term meaning “Arrest or apprehension by judicial process” (capture, n., 1.b.).
This suggests that the words’ adjudication of their images figures already at the level of their range of
possible meanings the judicial process that the books illustrate, as well as the one they perform.
37
I paraphrase and cite Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, “the event is what escapes the performative
convention” (“‘The Slightness of My Endeavor’: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.”
Comparative Literature 57:3 [Summer 2005], 264). Giorgio Agamben notes an etymological connection
between “escape” and “exception” that operates in this reading insofar as what “escapes” the conven-
tions of Mason’s texts does so partly by virtue of its visible exceptionalism (only one book with
Punishments in the title; only one moment of meta-typological intensity; only one instance of open
sympathy). As Agamben writes, “the exception is situated in a symmetrical position with respect to the
example, with which it forms a system. Exception and example constitute the two modes by which a
set tries to found and maintain its own coherence” (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, 1998], 21). But while “the example is excluded from the set insofar as
it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it”
(22)—that is, the exception must be included in the system as an indicator of nonbelonging. In this
sense, it belongs, of course, to the set in which it functions as the mark of nonbelonging.
38
Alain Badiou: what “composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to
a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language connected to it, etc. In fact, if we want to avoid lapsing
into an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a
given situation, nothing but a fragment of being”(Theoretical Writings [New York, 2004], 97).
those texts into the open, like Poe’s famous letter, is also, it seems to me,
indisputable. This concealing and unconcealing makes the sequence an event.
The sequence is punctuated by the moment at which the caption to “A Lame
Beggar” recognizes the possibility of the reader’s sympathetic relationship to the
image—the only time in either of Mason’s books that a caption explicitly acknowl-
edges the reader’s potential relation to the “pain and wretchedness” of the things it
depicts. “The unpleasant sensation which this object may at first excite,” Mason
writes, “will be materially dissipated by the consideration that all instances of natural
deformity, be it of limb or feature, are so very rare among the populous nations of
the eastern world, as to attract universal astonishment whenever they are presented
to the view” (CC, 220). Your English “unpleasant sensation” is a Chinese person’s
“universal astonishment,”39 a form of sympathy that makes sense only in a world
where we have completely forgotten the appearance of this figure in a typology of
Chinese workers produced for European consumption. The difference between
sensation and astonishment marks the difference between an interiorized consider-
ation of the lame beggar as a body in pain and a socio-cultural reading in which one
simply notes the presence of something from the far end of the bell curve. The
caption resists the sympathetic reaction in the name of an ethnographic expertise
that runs in two different directions: first it suggests, however hesitantly, that this
man has been crippled by design, and second, it asserts that since natural crippling is
exceedingly rare in the East, the reader should not be overly concerned about this
particular instance of it. The Costume of China’s most typologically archetypical
description thus comes at exactly the moment at which it feels obliged to defend
against the reader’s reaction to its images as though they were unmediated repre-
sentations by insisting both on the likelihood of the man’s being crippled on
purpose and on the sociocultural “fact” that there aren’t that many crippled people
in China anyway. Neither of these facts can exactly be drawn into the picture. The
caption therefore corrects an apprehension of the image as the portrait of a
particular sufferer by returning the image to its typological status in relation to
the entire book series.40
39
My reading of “unpleasant sensation” as the index of a potential sympathetic pain depends on
the fact that the end of the caption declares that “in the visage of this Cripple, pain and wretchedness
are most forcibly delineated” (CC, 220). The “Beggar with a Monkey,” the same caption says, expresses
“softness supplicating compassion”—another index of the text’s sense that the images are asking for
(supplicating) a certain kind of sympathetic attention. The actual caption to the “Beggar with a
Monkey,” incidentally, says nothing whatsoever about compassion or sympathy (CC, 166).
40
If Clunas is right that the images at the Victoria & Albert Museum are the ones Mason used for
his Costume book, then the real typological scandal is this: among the one hundred images in the set
The caption’s attempt to reduce the reader’s sympathy can now be returned to the
preface of the Punishments book published a year later. At preface’s end, Mason
directs the reader’s regard to the equivalent “punishments of England,” which he
judges to be effected “in a manner the most instantaneous and least sanguinary that
a compassionate people could adopt; and whose natural intrepidity is farther
manifested by this attention to the pangs of suffering humanity” (preface).41 That
last clause can be read to refer to the English attention to the pangs of English
criminals, manifested in the relatively compassionate and bloodless execution by
hanging. But “attention to the pangs of suffering humanity” is also the emotional
mode of the book itself, whose attention to Chinese punishments which themselves
do not exhibit an attention to suffering exercises a prosthetic compassion toward
Chinese “culprits” and “miscreants,” and a commensurate critique of Chinese
judges and magistrates, its judicial system, and its civilization.42
What remains to be thought, then, is the social situation that allowed this
hesitant arrangement of typology and sympathy to emerge, and which halts the
transformation of the one into the other by the judicious application of anthropo-
logical knowledge about China itself: the well-known temperance of the Chinese
government and the statistical rarity of “natural deformity” come into play in order
to stop the slide of typology into sympathy, of knowledge into identification. In both
cases knowledge about China appears at precisely the moment at which the books
threaten to become akin to the literature of sympathy with which any Englishman of
the period would have been intimately familiar. The eventfulness of this sequence
thus points towards a social and indeed epistemological situation in which the twin
drives of knowledge and sympathy hang in one another’s balance.
Now we must recall the immediate historical context for the sudden surge of
interest in things Chinese in early nineteenth century England, for which the
Macartney Embassy of 1793 was a crucial catalyst. No European relation to China
in this era—especially no relation in a Britain inundated with Chinese export goods,
organized around new cultural and behavioral spaces and rituals that integrated
are forty that the book does not reproduce, and among these, astonishingly, is another image of a
beggar—a fifth one (the image is reproduced in Clunas, 39).
41
It’s not the case, as Pericles Lewis reminds me, that one cannot have sympathy for a type—
think of sentimental fiction, or Oxfam ads, media in which the type rather than the individual
constitutes the major generic site of sympathy.
42
That the framing of this moment is implicitly Christian should not come as a surprise.
“Suffering humanity” is a stock phrase that describes both an attribute of Christ (he expresses and
displays, on the cross, his own suffering humanity) as well as humankind more generally in a wide
variety of Christian sources.
recognizably Chinese material into everyday life (tea time, for instance; or the
Chinese garden)—occurred outside the framework of worries about international
trade. Throughout the eighteenth century, Chinese demand for silver, largely a
product of the Qing economy’s remonetization, dominated its trade with the rest
of the world. The resulting flow of silver bullion to China—Andre Gunder Frank
estimates that between 1600 and 1800 China purchased as much as half of the world’s
total production, much of it carried by Europeans from their New World mines—
created a great deal of mercantilist anxiety throughout Europe (mercantilists, you
will recall, held that the state’s supply of capital in the form of bullion was the direct
expression of its international strength). This anxiety expressed itself in legislation
requiring the British East India Company to have homegrown manufactures account
for at least ten percent of its trade, a requirement largely met throughout the
eighteenth century by cooking the books.43 The rectification of the trade deficit
had been one of the major goals of Lord Macartney’s notoriously unsuccessful 1793
embassy. Macartney’s samples of England’s most technologically advanced products,
which he hoped would convince the Chinese to trade, were met, however, with
disdain, the Qianlong emperor famously writing to Macartney that “We have never
valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s
manufactures.”44
Considered in relation to this context—which was, let us not forget, the
immediate context for the publication of Staunton’s account of the 1793 embassy,
which Mason consulted, as well as Alexander’s 1805 Costume of China volume—
the “attention to the pangs of suffering humanity” Mason praises in his English
43
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998). The gap
between the Chinese and European economies can be measured by the fact that between 1660 to 1720,
“precious metals made up on average 87 percent of VOC [Dutch East India Company] imports into Asia”;
as for the British East India Company, it “had to resort to over- and under-invoicing” in order to comply,
at least on paper, with the demand that it export British products (Frank 74). Descriptions of the general
economic situation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries appear in the early chapters of
Hunt Janin, The India-China Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, N.C., 1999) and Jack
Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (London, 1975). For a corrective to Frank’s Sinocentric world system,
see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton, N.J, 2000). Adam Smith discusses the China trade, and particularly its relation to
silver, at length in The Wealth of Nations (New York, 2000), esp. 237–38.
44
Cited in Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New
York, 2000), 92. As Waley-Cohen argues, this position, read by the British as an outlandish declaration
of cultural arrogance, should be understood as an exercise of caution justified by, among other things,
late eighteenth-century massacres of Chinese expatriates by Europeans in the Philippines, Batavia, and
Taiwan (93). Frank gives a slightly different translation of Qianlong’s letter: “I set no value on objects
strange or ingenious, and we have no use for your country’s manufactures” (273).
readers might be thought of as a gesture inside an international economy of

sympathy, a sympathy whose anthropological and geographic extension to the
world beyond Europe was only then on the verge of occurring. That a difference
between English and Chinese sympathy in relation to judicial punishment was
already the subject of some kind of cultural discourse is testified to, of course, by
the sheer appearance of this book in the costume series, and by Pu Qua’s sense
that a set of portrayals of Chinese punishments would sell to European buyers
(meanwhile, where were the Chinese books designed to produce compassion in
relation to the suffering English?).45 But here I am also opening the possibility
that the idea of sympathy itself, as one self-conscious justification for the publi-
cation of such books, ought to be thought in relation to the politics of interna-
tional trade as a kind of affective and cultural surplus, as though compassion itself
were a good whose excess in the British Isles would allow it to be sent, along with
British silver, to the Far East. Rey Chow has made a similar argument about
twentieth-century debates around human rights, noting that in the 1980s and
early 1990s discussions about the release of Chinese political prisoners almost
always took place as part of business negotiations involving US companies’
desires to invest in the Chinese economy.46 I will have more to say about this
later on, but for now, in this context, consider this site of intersection between
English trade and the growing sense of the importance of sympathy in defining
the nature of human beings and their social relations: the opening sentences of
the first chapter of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some
principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and
render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it
except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the
emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are
made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow
from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any
45
A lengthier and better-informed comparison between the two legal systems in this era comes
with the publication in 1810 of Staunton’s translation of the Qing legal code. In the translator’s preface
Staunton writes that though there “are certainly many points upon which these laws are altogether
indefensible. We shall look in vain, for instance, for those excellent principles of the English law, by
which every man is presumed innocent until he is proved guilty; and no man required to criminate
himself. . . . But it will scarcely escape observation, that there are other parts of the [Chinese] code
which, in a considerable degree, compensate these and similar defects, are altogether of a different
complexion, and are perhaps not unworthy of imitation” (xxiv).
46
See the introduction to The Protestant Ethnic & the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 2002).
instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions
of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane,
though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The
greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not
altogether without it. (9)
Smith would go on to publish the great critique of British mercantilism in his

1776 The Wealth of Nations, and the conjunction between the two books allows us
to see how closely the theorization of sympathy as the source of humanness and
of morals more generally could dovetail, and did so in Smith’s body of work, with
a theory of human behavior organized around labor and exchange.47 This
congruity allows me to suggest that the sympathetic drive articulated in Mason’s
preface to Punishments appears in much larger European philosophical context in
which the idea of sympathy as a fundamental aspect of the human is inextricably
intertwined with theories having to do with the development of such global (and
globalizing) concepts as “Western civilization” or “political economy,” two forms
whose practical workings out spent a great deal of energy thinking about and
around the China trade. Because, considered as the subject of exchange, sympathy
functions like a gift—it can be given without the consent of the person one feels
compassionate toward—it would have been in 1801 the only tradable commodity
that English people could force China to accept from them.
Compared to the The Costume of China’s aggressive dismissal of sympathy
in relation to the lame beggar,48 the economics of compassion articulated
47
The movement from “sympathy” in Moral Sentiments to self-interest (in The Wealth of
Nations) has often been read as the product of a major change in Smith’s philosophy, producing an
apparent paradox generally referred to as the “Adam Smith problem.” In their introduction to The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie dismiss the idea that the works conflict,
citing material from the sixth edition of Moral Sentiments (published in 1790) that refers specifically to
its having fulfilled the promise of The Wealth of Nations (20–25) and noting that the original material
for both books was likely worked out at roughly the same time as part of Smith’s first lectures at the
University of Glasgow in the early 1750s. Alexander Broadie compares the production of mutual
sympathy in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to the process of “truck, barter, and exchange” he
describes in The Wealth of Nations in “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” The Cambridge
Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006).
48
On the second page of Moral Sentiments, Smith, in arguing for the universality of sympathetic
identification, connects it successively to judicial execution and to begging: “The mob, when they are
gazing at a dancer on a slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they
seem him do . . . . Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking
on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or
uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies” (9). That the major narrative event of
Mason’s two books passes through this same pairing suggests, if nothing else, that in the context of
in the preface to Punishments feels strange and self-contradictory indeed. But the
elliptical sequence whereby Mason’s books tie modest decorum to critical judg-
ment, violent judicial punishments to a children’s puppet show, antisympathetic
typology to a compassionate attention to suffering—not to mention caption to
image, a pairing that expresses formally the historico-commercial relationship
between Mason and Pu Qua—must be thought of as elliptical and as a sequence,
a single string raveled into a single knot.
The sequence, with all its apparent contradictions, opens itself to a literal reading
as contradictory insofar as it records an oscillation between two profoundly incom-
patible forms of interest: first, the typological–ethnographic desire of the entire
costume series, the desire to know and to organize that knowledge so as to make
sense of the world; and second, the desire to attend specifically to the customs of a
culture that generate sympathetic pain and a gratitude for the gift of Englishness,
that is, the desire to generate in relation to another culture perceived as powerful and
strange a cultural power of one’s own.49 The incompatibility between these two
forms comes from the fact that the epistemological desire of the book project
depends on a relatively neutral cultural position in relation to otherness, whereas
the wish to produce sympathy leads of necessity to a negative judgment on the
question of China’s temperance and wisdom, and abets, tellingly, the myth of
historical stasis that would, later in the nineteenth century, justify (in most cases
after the fact) the punitive drive to shake China up through trade, modernization,
and warfare. That the preface so openly announces its wish to respect that temper-
ance in the same sentence that implicitly “arraigns” China for lacking it can now be
seen as the stuttering expression of this dialectic, the single and most open moment
of the logic of this event, its narrative beginning—where we first saw and began
reading the problem of the text—and its logical “ending,” its closure, all at once.
Only by grasping the internal logic of Mason’s books as a form of coherence, as
a total expression of their ideological and literary positions, can we also place the
movement they generate between texts, between sympathy and its negation,
between cruelty and its abnegation, within the more general framework of
thinking sympathetically such a thematic passage can be unfolded naturally, that is, without announc-
ing a special or unusual conjunction.
49
For foreigners in China at the end of the eighteenth century the desire to learn more about
China took place in relation to a Chinese government that was explicitly uninterested in letting
foreigners know much about China. In the preface to the Costume book of 1800, Mason remarks on the
“very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton” and tells the story of an
attempted expedition into the city that resulted in the temporary arrest of one of his company and the
group’s return to the part of the city reserved for foreign traders (6).
material exchange to which they also belong. The “total” Mason, or Mason’s
books as a “total” event, belongs properly to all of its dimensions—to the
modalities of literariness that open themselves to close reading, to the modalities
of ekphrasis that open relations between picture and word, to the modalities of
form that arrange its typologies, to the system of international exchange that
allowed Mason to purchase Pu Qua’s pictures, and led Pu Qua to paint them, and
to the historical developments that link the rise of the culture of sympathy to this
particular moment in England’s trade relations with China. Only within this
totality do contradictions express and illuminate the system to which they belong,
and which they represent as a totality over and against any particular motive,
conscious or unconscious, Mason might have had for writing what he did, or
William Miller for publishing it. Only insofar as they do this, and do it within the
frame of this particular reading, do they speak, also, to the social situation of their
era. What they show is, quite simply, the ways in which sympathy emerged
alongside, and through, the dual facts of material and political economic ex-
change, and the degree to which a compensatory relationship between the eco-
nomic and the sympathetic could appear well before its conscious apprehension
as a tool of international political relations, and the ways in which deeply modern
structures of knowledge like the typological volume were themselves articulations
of that relationship.
One might think of the “literary,” unrealistic (literally preposterous) logic
whereby the Mason texts indicate this situation as a formal gesture that reverses
the structure of the anecdote as Joel Fineman defines it. If in theorizing the
anecdote’s referential opening to history, Fineman had to read and foreground
reference against the predominantly literary appearance of anecdotal form, here
one might say that I have had to foreground the literary aspects of these texts in
order to overcome the rhetorical and formal weight of their call to reference, to
typological actuality. Whereas in Greenblatt the attention to the goldsmith’s “real
body” and “real pain” might be said to occur, however, in the mode of resistance
to the violence of imperialism, in Mason’s text the sympathetic gesture that
emerges “against” the will of the text (and at the same time very much “for” it)
must be understood as part and parcel of a burgeoning representational violence,
in which the distribution of national forms of sympathy, particularly as
connected to forms of judicial punishment, would become part of the cultural
justification for European and American interventions (whether through trade,
diplomacy, foreign aid, or warfare) in countries that were not able to express a
compelling counter-narrative to humanist sympathy (or were not able to back up
their own national story, whatever it was, with military or cultural power that
might have permitted open resistance).50 The history of human rights in the
twentieth century is, as I suggested in the introduction, an etiological cousin to
the sympathy that these two books both conceal and express through (both
because of and despite) the contortions of their form. The shadow cast by that
cousinage flickers, today, amidst dreams of a total global convergence.
50
To be clear: no representation happens without some violence; this argument is historical, not
moral.
3 The Chinese Body in Pain
American Missionary Medical Care, 1838–1852
They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.
—James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.

—Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic
I closed the previous chapter by suggesting that the sympathetic exchange

generated by the interaction between the reader of Mason’s books and the people
it represented had to be thought within the more literal exchange of goods
between England and China, and could therefore be conceived as a kind of
aggressive affective response—a structure of feeling, to borrow Raymond Wil-
liams’ term—in which British impotence at the level of the material good was
assuaged by Chinese impotence at the level of the emotional one.
The interchange between sympathetic and economic exchange captured so
neatly by the figure of Balzac’s mandarin must stretch a bit to cover the figural
and historical range that connects George Henry Mason’s two books on China to
the diplomatic failure of the Macartney Embassy that preceded it. But it takes only
a little imagination to see how an amplified figure binding Europe’s sympathetic
impulse to its relation to the Chinese economy can bring a good deal of the
nineteenth-century relations between East and West under its umbrella. Only
four decades after the publication of Mason’s The Punishments of China, tensions
around trade and diplomatic recognition, coupled with internal pressures on
95
China’s Qing dynasty rulers, would lead directly to the two Opium Wars fought
between Britain and China (1839–42 and 1856–60; the French fought alongside the
British in the second war). The wars’ major underlying cause lay in the confronta-
tion of Chinese legal and economic sovereignty and Western trading interests. The
Chinese government’s refusal to accept anything other than silver in payment for
its goods, so clearly established by Qianlong’s response to Macartney, continued to
aggravate its Western trading partners, who cast about, as Macartney himself had,
for goods that the Chinese would want enough to pay silver for. Beginning in the
late 1700s, the British East India Company, using poppies grown in India, began to
sell opium to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver coin and bullion, a major
step in redressing the imbalance that had defined China’s trading relation to the
rest of the world for the previous two hundred years. The trade in opium, at about
seventy-five tons a year in 1773 (the year the East India Company acquired its fifty-
year monopoly on the opium trade), grew to 1,400 tons annually by the late 1830s,
becoming “the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in
the world.”1 The wars themselves were the result of the clash produced by the Qing
government’s attempts to halt the opium trade and British resistance to doing so.2
Among other things the “unequal treaties” signed between the victorious Western
powers and the Chinese government at the end of these wars had the effect of
opening up China to foreign travel, trade, and missionary work; as a result, the
British gained the land that became Hong Kong, a number of Chinese cities
became official “treaty ports” (until 1842 the only site for legal trade between
China and the West had been the foreign concession area of Canton), and
Christians were granted full civil rights, including the right to evangelize and
own property. The negotiation of these treaties thus brought together in an
especially real way the relation between sympathetic and capitalist exchange
1
Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (London, 1975), 39. The financial estimate comes from
Edward Gulick, who places the value of the opium traded annually in China in the 1830s at $15 million
(Peter Parker and the Opening of China [Cambridge, 1973], 81.).
2
The actual incidents leading up to both wars were marred by cultural misunderstandings on
both sides. But they simply provided an occasion for what was in effect an armed heist; one of the
results of the Convention of Peking, signed in 1860, was to legalize the opium trade. For a basic though
somewhat dated history of the wars, see Beeching; on trade, see Hunt Janin, The India-China Opium
Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, N.C., 1999); for a scholarly reading of the issues at stake, see
the first section of James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century
China (Durham, N.C, 2003); on Hevia, see Haun Saussy, “China and the World: The Tale of a Topos,”
Modern Language Quarterly 68:2 (June 2007).
THE CHINESE BODY IN PAIN 97
(and their mutual intertwining with military power); indeed, the very question of
how an explicitly Christian compassion might be extended into China’s interior
was part and parcel of the negotiations whereby Britain and France forced open
Chinese markets and treaty ports to Western goods.3
1. Market Penetration
Within a historical context there is always room for cultural analysis, since, first,
the particularities of any given moment will outline for us the possible shapes of
the general and the real, and since, second, those shapes reveal the apparent
exceptions, the statistical outliers, the conscious or unconscious forms of resis-
tance to history whose apprehension within the frameworks of the possible grants
history the truth of its lovely, protean complexities. In pursuit of those complex-
ities, and of the remainders or exceptions within them, the rest of this chapter
focuses on one particularly benevolent expression of the interaction between
sympathetic and economic exchange in China: the life and work of the first
director of a Western missionary hospital there, Peter Parker. In the twenty
years between his founding of the Ophthalmic Infirmary in Canton and his
1855 resignation from the hospital, Parker and his colleagues treated some fifty
thousand patients for all manner of injury, illness, and disease, from cataracts to
leprosy, hernias to gunshot wounds, developing such a reputation that sufferers
traveled hundreds of miles from China’s interior to obtain medical care there.4
3
This emphasis on the real-world role China played in the cultural imagination of China should
not be taken to diminish the importance of figuration and language, even within things as real as wars.
Important parts of the Opium War treaty negotiations involved debate over the use and translation of
particular Chinese words (which were therefore also taken as one of the war’s “causes”). See Lydia Liu’s
The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, 2005) for a lengthy
and provocative analysis of the debates over the English translation of the Chinese yi; see also Hevia’s
English Lessons.
4
For much of the biographical material on Peter Parker I am relying on Edward V. Gulick’s Peter
Parker and the Opening of China (Cambridge, 1973); further citations in the text are cited as PP. The
name of Parker’s hospital reflected a set of medical ambitions derived at least partly from the difference
between Chinese and Western medicine at the time; diseases of the eye, particularly cataracts, were
prevalent in China partly because Chinese medicine did not have methods for treating them. The
hospital’s Chinese name appeared on a sign over the hospital entrance: Pu Ai Yi Yuan, or “Hospital of
Universal Love,” which reflected Parker’s sense of the different work his hospital was doing for its
Chinese and Anglophone audiences. Stephen Rachman observes that allowing the choice of ophthal-
mology corresponds to the biblical injunction to restore sight to the blind, a reference by way of the
hospital’s English name that would have been lost on Chinese audiences (“Memento Morbi: Lam Qua’s
Parker also trained several Chinese students in Western medicine, traveled to the
United States and Europe to raise funds for his group of medical missionaries,
and served, from 1852 to 1857, in a number of official diplomatic capacities for the
U.S. government. Though gaps in Parker’s medical records and the absence of
testimony from his patients make it difficult to establish the full range of his
impact on the people he treated and the community in which he lived, it is
certainly fair to say that in his lifetime he was the most visible face of Western
medicine in China, both for the Chinese he treated and for the many Americans
and Europeans who heard about, admired, and contributed to his work.5
Parker’s legacy to the present lies in a surprisingly large amount of representa-
tional objects and textual forms—among them letters, journals, poems, sermons,
and medical case studies, line drawings of medical symptoms and, most notori-
ously, oil portraits of his patients—most of which can be found today in the
Parker archive at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library of the
Yale University Medical School. Considered as a whole collection, these docu-
ments constitute a significant historical effect of the new, sympathetic “cognitive
style” promoted by the rapid expansion of capitalist markets, a style driven, as
Thomas L. Haskell has argued, by a radically amplified sense of moral distance
and a concomitant expansion of the geographic field in which Europeans and
Americans felt like they could intervene.6 Though Britons might well feel that the
Paintings, Peter Parker’s Patients.” Literature and Medicine 23.1 [Spring 2004], 142.). Further citations
of Rachman in the text are cited as MM.
5
Gulick notes that Parker generally did not record his medical failures; given that most patients
returned home shortly after treatment and had no further contact with Parker, the long-term effects of
his care cannot be evaluated.
6
Haskell originally made these arguments in two essays on “Capitalism and the Origins of
Humanitarian Sensibility,” which are reprinted, along with responses to his work by David Brion Davis
and John Ashworth, in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism, ed. Thomas Bender
(Berkeley, 1992). I find Haskell’s remarks on the origins of sympathy convincing and useful because
they avoid imagining the relation between sympathy and capital as an act of willed ideological
complicity, a ruse played by the bourgeoisie on the working classes. It is clear that the expansion of
compassion in various ways helped sustain the exploitations of capitalism and coexisted with a great
deal of European violence against others both at home and abroad (as Davis puts it in the case of
abolition, “the growing power of antislavery in early industrial Britain was at least partly a function of
the fit between antislavery ideology and the interests of an emergent capitalist class” [Bender, 308]).
This chapter, like much of the book, is in the position of arguing for the truth of this historical case
without then arguing that the expansion of sympathy was therefore in any simple way morally
“wrong” or simply a conscious tool of European and American elites. Like the scholars working on
the antislavery movement, none of whom regrets the end of slavery, I am trying to show the moral
complexity of a particular history. Insofar as my analysis favors explanations of Haskell’s type—which
he understands as Weberian, and I read within a more Foucauldian framework—it does so in order to
suffering Chinese patient was “far off,” Parker wrote in a 1841 fundraising letter to
a Scottish admirer, if those of “undoubted benevolence, yet of contracted views,
but inform themselves of the extent and condition of the whole world,” they
would “expand their sympathies wide as the wants of men, and put forth
exertions commensurate with their abilities and opportunities of blessing a
world.”7 The entire Parker archive testifies to the essentially planetary scope of
this sympathy. Its objects are the direct product of the new fluidities of capital—
for which “money is as easily given to be expended on the one side of the world as
the other,” as Parker wrote—that allowed Parker and the other medical mission-
aries he worked with to put this newly expanded compassion into active practice.8
All this expansive compassion was staged, throughout Parker’s writings
and indeed in the pamphlets and documents announcing his founding, with
T.R. Colledge and E.C. Bridgman, of the Medical Missionary Society in China in
1836, through a series of remarkably explicit references to the medical practice
these young men intended to undertake. China’s “fevers are as burning—insanity
as raving—leprosy as polluting—blindness as great—its cancer and stone as
painful, and gout as excruciating,” Parker told the readers of his fundraising
letter, “as they would be, if only the Mersey or the British Channel separated them
from the skill and charity that could relieve them.”9 Such an assertion of equal
pain allowed Parker to direct his claims about the need for sympathy toward a
potent universalism. Operating at the level of the species, Parker’s call to recog-
nize the Chinese sufferer’s pain as equal required his donors to recognize that
sufferer as a fellow human being. The legitimacy of that recognition thus relied on
the ways that a universally vulnerable human body could overcome, both literally
and figuratively, the barriers that geography or culture posed to international
exchange.
trace the history of a range of thinkable possibilities that define an era (Foucault) and to suggest that
systems of behavior and belief relatively disconnected from each other might nonetheless sustain one
another by establishing a set of general principles from which one or the other system might be
justified or sustained (Weber).
7
Statements Respecting Hospitals in China Preceded by a Letter to John Abercrombie, M.D., V.P.R.S.E.
(Glasgow, 1842), 7.
8
In the rhetoric of this argument we see how changes in technologies of travel and capital flow
were crucial supports for the expansion of moral distance sympathy required; the difference between
the stranger at the doorstep and the one on the other side of the world was effectively erased by the
presence of those who, like Parker, were willing to travel from one to the other in order to go to the
latter’s aid.
9
Peter Parker, Statements Respecting Hospitals in China, 7.
But there was more to the medical missionary project than a simple corporeal
universalism. It was in fact precisely the body’s universal qualities that would
allow Parker and his colleagues to circumvent the cultural and political barriers
that kept them from evangelizing to the Chinese. The Chinese government’s
resistance to Western trade and travel could not easily be extended, after all, to
the interior of Chinese bodies. “Exclusive as China is, in all her systems,” Parker
and his friends wrote, “she cannot exclude disease, nor shut her people up from
the desire of relief.” Like Mason’s descriptions of the Chinese prisoners, in which a
sense of outrage directed at the Chinese government for its cruelty was turned to
a recognition of the uniquely British attention to the pangs of a universally
“suffering humanity,” Parker, Colledge, and Bridgman’s emphasis on the shared
humanity (and frailty) of their Chinese patients allowed them to circumvent the
government that would keep them isolated from Western influence. Though we
should beware of taking too seriously the puffery inherent in fundraising letters,
it is clear enough that for the Medical Missionary Society, the body’s universal
vulnerability to suffering allowed it to function, essentially, as an evangelical and
sociological Trojan horse—or, as Parker, Colledge, and Bridgman had it at one
point, as China’s “only open door.”10
We are accustomed to recognizing universalism of this type as the projected
philosophical substructure of an aggressive Western imperialism. Within its
historical context, however, the position that argued for the equivalence of
English and Chinese fevers was a comparatively progressive one. Nineteenth-
century American hierarchies of physical sensitivity to pain operated along scales
involving race, class, gender, and experience in more or less the directions one
would expect: the famous nineteenth-century American neurologist S. Weir
Mitchell once wrote that “in our process of being civilized, we have won,
I suspect, intensified capacity to suffer. The savage does not feel pain as we
do.”11 Parker’s faith in the Chinese desire for relief from pain, coupled with his
assertion of the equality of suffering, put him, against Mitchell and other less
clever racists, on the side of those who tended to deduce from their arguments
about the universal equality of pain “important implications for the actual
10
T. R. Colledge, Peter Parker, and E.C. Bridgman, Suggestions for the Formation of a Medical
Missionary Society offered to the consideration of all Christian Nations, more especially to the kindred
nations of England and the United States of America (Canton, 1836), 9.
11
Cited in David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley, 1991), 39. S. Weir Mitchell, incidentally,
treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose The Yellow Wallpaper was intended specifically as a rebuke to
his methods.
treatment of human beings,” including theories of universal human rights, of the

type toward which we see Parker slouching in his fundraising letter.12
Even as it produced a sense of the potential equality of cultural claims to
compassionate relief, however, Parker’s discussion of medicine and shared pain
also sustained quite explicitly a discourse about cultural transformation tied to
the kind of epistemological project that would help the West better understand
China, trade with it, and evangelize it. Records of the treatment of the Chinese,
noted an early Medical Missionary Society address, “will in time be curious
and instructive documents, and such as will enable us to glance at the penetralia
of domestic and social life in China, which we now can only read of, or view at a
distance, from the very outskirts of the country.”13
Leaving aside the classically masculine progression that would lead Westerners
from China’s “outskirts” to its “penetralia,” I wish instead to concentrate on the
latter term, whose explicitly medical connotations once again link the specific
material project of the missionary hospital to the larger political and economic
context in which it occurred. Because the major difference between Western and
Chinese medicine in this era was that Chinese doctors did not do surgery (and in
general avoided cutting into the body at all), the desire to glance at China’s
penetralia unites the missionaries’ epistemological interest with the defining
difference between Western and Chinese medical practice. A willingness to
open up the body, to surgically manipulate its parts and mysteries, held the key
to Parker’s ability to cure conditions for which Chinese doctors had no ready
solution. For Parker and his colleagues to imagine that their medical practice
would take them into China’s penetralia thus linked medical practice to ethnog-
raphy, the former not only allegorizing the latter (as one might cheerfully expect
from this sort of literary criticism), but literally making it possible, the opening of
Chinese bodies not only resembling the opening of Chinese cultural life to the
West, but inaugurating it.14
12
Martin Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-
Century America. (New York, 1985), 166.
13
T. R. Colledge, Peter Parker, and E.C. Bridgman. “Medical Missionary Society in China
address” Signed by T.R. Colledge, Peter Parker, and E.C. Bridgman, with minutes and proceedings
(Canton, 1838), 15.
14
A second example: through the medical missions, the doctors wrote, “Everything about
[Chinese] domestic history, ways of thinking, social feelings, nay the very penetralia of their hearts
and dwellings, are brought under contemplation” (The first and second reports of the Medical Mission-
ary Society in China, with minutes of proceedings, hospital reports, &c. [Macao, 1841], 8.). Here again, the
proximity of Chinese “hearts” to Chinese “penetralia” suggests how tightly knit were the metaphors
By the time of Parker’s invocation of the problem of moral distance in his 1841
fundraising letter, then, his own experience in China had already prepared him to
imagine that missionary medicine could resolve this problem in two different
ways. First, it could bridge the distance between Westerners and the Chinese by
taking advantage of the universal fact of pain and the desire for relief, producing
or even forcing an occasion for interaction that would overcome any reluctance
to engage in cross-cultural exchange. Second, the actions taking place in the
neutral meeting ground of the operating theater would decrease distance by
giving the Chinese a favorable impression of these benevolent Westerners and
allowing the Westerners in turn to understand the lives of the Chinese—this latter
providing, as Parker, Colledge, and Bridgman suggested to their potential donors,
substantial benefits outside the field of medicine. As the missionaries cut apart,
sewed together, and otherwise repaired their wounded patients, as they spent
nights at the bedsides of those with whom they shared no common language, as
they urged them to praise the God who had brought them to the Ophthalmic
Infirmary rather than the doctors whose hands had rifled their flesh, they
attempted to suture these Chinese strangers to a moral and cultural world that
would profoundly change their relationship to their bodies, to suffering, and to
the imaginary geographies of the planet.
Indeed a sense of the planetary organism’s increased, recursive awareness of
every part of its surface was crucial to the philosophical work that imagined the
very possibility of a “cosmopolitan law,” as Immanuel Kant wrote in 1795, figuring
that awareness specifically as an extension of feeling: “intercourse . . . which has
been everywhere steadily increasing between the nations of the earth, has now
extended so enormously that a violation of right in one part of the world is felt all
over it (an allen gefühlt wird).” That such a position encoded Western superiority
in a universal and disinterested rationality was presumably part of its appeal,
though in Kant’s case, it was also turned toward an attempt to protect non-
Europeans from European imperialism.15 Likewise, for Parker, the willingness to
recognize foreign bodies as no different from familiar ones was a gesture turned
very much back toward the project of sympathy itself, since it was because the
that bound together the general project for which Parker was soliciting funds in his 1841 fundraising
letter.
15
Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophic Essay, trans. M. Campbell Smith (London, 1917), 142. In
the preceding paragraphs Kant discussed the violations of the right of hospitality perpetrated by
European imperialists in Africa and the Americas and praised China and Japan for “wisely” refusing
Europeans entry to their shores.
Chinese were like us in body that we might, in time, convince them to be like us
in spirit. Throughout Parker’s life and work this evangelical and cultural project
was inextricably tied to the specifically medical contours of the work in which
he engaged, both because of the metaphorical importance of penetralia, and
because, as he, Colledge, and Bridgman wrote, “purity and disinterestedness of
motive are more clearly evinced” in medical care than in any other arena of life.16
That the Medical Missionary Society’s views were hardly disinterested, given their
evangelical ambitions, need not detain us long. Rather, I wish to draw attention to
the way that medicine became for these men the public and highly visible site of
a universal, benevolent neutrality, even as its practice enacted the kinds of
penetration and transformation that were typical of the larger projects of both
soft and hard imperialisms that sustained them.
2. Face, Tumor, Style
Physical pain feels like an encounter with the world’s irreducible ontological
being. No one can tell you that something of yours hurts when it doesn’t, or
doesn’t hurt when it does. The idea that someone else could adjudicate the value
of one’s pain tends to produce a real sense of outrage, just as the plaints of those
who suffer from pains we deem minor or irrelevant can seem like the most
extravagant whine. Physical pain, one might say, functions as the final frontier
of culture, the last refuge of the actual and the real. And this is why imagining
pain as the product of culture strikes most people, reflexively, as a dangerous
gesture: it threatens to remove from the individual subject the right to determine
and shape the public meaning of what seems to be his or her most private
experience and, in the process, encourages a kind of decadent cultural disregard
for the subject’s right to make truth claims about itself. This is why Stephen
Greenblatt can insist that any criticism that fails to attend to the bare reality of the
goldsmith’s pain, or which imagines it simply as a fictional effect, ignores with
an almost total irresponsibility the raw stuff of reality, or confuses the latter with
some linguistic game.
The last three decades have seen a tremendous growth in historical and
sociological treatments of pain, ranging from case studies to local and global
histories, descriptions of particularly significant events in the cultural experience
16
Medical Missionary Society in China address,” 13.
and value of pain (the discovery of chemical anesthetics, for instance) to

millennia-long histories of pain’s medical treatment that think shifts in its
normativity, its relation to theories of the body, the state, and of the divine.
Such treatments almost inevitably begin their cultural and historical analyses
with a discussion of pain’s intense reality, since this is in some important sense the
first anthropological fact about pain: that it shares with rocks and other hard
places an uncannily doubled relation to the cultural and the real.17 “While pain
appears at one moment as an unmediated and unmistakable fact, the next
moment it seems produced by a dialectic interaction of biological and social
processes,” write the editors of one recent collection on chronic pain. The remark
captures perfectly the awkward matrix by which pain appears, from moment to
moment, or sometimes even inside a single moment, to be the product of
radically disparate kinds of causes, and directs us to attend to the nature of
pain as precisely that which preserves, even when it acts so visibly inside
the field of culture—and indeed calls out for a cultural field in which it might
acquire public recognition and care—some irrevocable grasp on a nature that
precedes it.18
Lest a sense of pain’s cultural complexity be understood as a purely contem-
porary knowledge whose apprehension was unavailable to our benighted fore-
bears, we should recognize that nineteenth-century imperialists understood this
just as well as we do—even if they did not have the good taste to theorize it. As
Talal Asad has noted, Western interventions in the colonies frequently attempted
to manage local relations to physical pain, retaining (and finding valuable) kinds
of suffering deemed necessary for the transformation of local conditions to
modernity (the destruction of cultures, of autochthonous familial structures,
and the like), while attempting to eradicate through violence or pedagogical
remediation those forms of suffering deemed barbaric, irresponsible or gratu-
itous in relation to the project of modernization. Because, as Asad writes, pain
“is . . . a way of constituting the epistemological status of the body,” such attempts
17
See for instance David Morris and Martin Pernick; Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress
and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven, 1986) and The Illness
Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York, 1988), among many other works;
on narratives of pain, Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago, 1997),
Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience
(Cambridge, 1998), and Roseleyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliott Wallace, J. A. Cadden,
and S. W. Cadden (Cambridge, 1998).
18
Arthur Kleinman, Paul Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, “Introduc-
tion,” in Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley, 1992), 8.
to transform the nature of physical pain carried with them profound implications
for a variety of cultural practices (among them various forms of bodily transfor-
mation or “mutilation,” religious rituals, or such practices as sati or cannibalism)
that themselves articulated large-scale social relations, reinforced cultural norms,
and located the body in a social world.19
As it collects and negotiates the pain and suffering of those on whom Parker
worked, the Parker archive formalizes an encounter with a nearly cavernous
epistemological otherness centered on a differential experience of physical pain.
The paintings, boxes, and case studies that make up the Parker collection seem in
their recording of this otherness to preserve some measure of the preternatural
reality of the past. As I shall suggest, the record established by the paintings, case
studies, and other objects collected in his archive at the medical library at Yale
indicate the historical possibility of a relation to Chinese suffering that escapes or
betrays the pressing possibilities of national-economic allegory we saw in the
work of George Henry Mason, or the intensely realistic ontology of pain elabo-
rated in Greenblatt’s reading of the torture of the Chinese goldsmith. Pressing the
quotidian experience of Parker’s operations against the historical and formal
contexts in which they emerged, this chapter reads the chronicle of Chinese
pain that appears in the Parker archive as the expression of an entire style of
representation that organizes—or seems to organize—a relationship between the
cultural and the real.
3. The Lam Qua Portraits
Six years after opening his hospital in the foreign concession area along the Pearl
River in Canton, Parker, having left China because of the first Opium War,
traveled to the United States and Europe in order to raise funds for his missionary
work. While in London, Parker had occasion to visit Guy’s Hospital, where he
met with several doctors and visited the institution’s medical displays. Touring
the hospital as a guest, he came upon several oil paintings of Chinese patients
exhibiting extraordinarily large external tumors. He described the encounter in
his personal journal:
Found a collection of my patients in the Museum. Copies of the original.

But no one suspected they had been operated on. I as a stranger asked who
19
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), 92.
Fig 3.1 Parker collection,

no. 50. Courtesy of Yale
University, Harvey Cush-
ing/John Hay Whitney
Medical Library.
operated. ‘Not operated upon etc . . . ’ was the reply. ‘Yes, they have, all of
them & with success,’ I informed them. Much interest was expressed in
learning the history of the etc.20
The moment must have been a fairly triumphant one. The paintings—painted
by the Cantonese artist Lam Qua at Parker’s request during the years following
the hospital’s founding in 1835—had apparently been exhibited at Guy’s as
illustrations of medical curiosities, pictures of people with external tumors of
a size then completely unknown in the West. By revealing that these were
paintings of his patients, and, what’s more, by announcing that he had removed
the tumors, Parker impressed his British colleagues with his surgical skill and
medical expertise (“Much interest was expressed in learning the history,” as he
writes) and turned the subjects of the portraits from unfortunates into patients, a
shift in role that would have lent much support to Parker’s arguments about the
20
Gulick, 105.
ease with which Britons could participate in alleviating the suffering of the
Chinese.21
The portraits Parker had come across at Guy’s were part of a larger collection
of at least 114 pictures, showing some eighty of Parker’s patients, painted by Lam
Qua (Guan Qiaochang) in the years between 1836 and 1852.22 The fact that we
know Lam Qua’s real name marks already a major difference between his status in
Canton and that of the watercolorist Pu Qua, whose name appears on the pages
of Mason’s Punishments book. By the mid-1830s, it was possible for a painter
working in the Western style, as Lam Qua did, to acquire an international
reputation and to have that reputation make his studio one of the mandatory
stops on any new visitor’s tour of Canton. From a three-story building located
near the factory district, Lam Qua and his numerous assistants produced singular
portraits of wealthy merchants in the English grand manner of Sir Thomas
Lawrence or Sir William Beechey, and they also generated business through the
rapid production of souvenir images of Canton, “combining factory models of
production with the romantic notion of the autonomous individual artist,” much
as Pu Qua had done three decades earlier (MM, 140).23
21
The episode is nonetheless bizarre. How could Parker not have known that copies of the
paintings, which he had had made in Canton between 1836 and 1840, were at Guy’s Hospital? Or rather,
how could the paintings have gotten to Guy’s without Parker’s help? In his memoir of his years as a
medical missionary, Parker’s colleague William Lockhart asserts that Parker “presented a set of
[portraits] to the Museum of Guy’s Hospital” (The Medical Missionary in China: A Narrative of
Twenty Years’ Experience [London, 1861], 171.). But if Parker presented the portraits himself, he could
only have done so on the same 1841 trip during which he claims to have “found” them there, in which
case his anecdote of discovery makes no sense. That said, if he didn’t bring the paintings from Canton
with him, then how did they get to Guy’s at all? According to Sander Gilman, the portraits “were used
by Parker on his trip to England as well as in the United States to illustrate his presentation of his case
studies to such groups as the Boston Medical Society in order to raise funds for his missionary work”
(“Lam Qua and the Development of a Westernized Medical Iconography in China,” Medical History 30
[1986], 62.). Again, this makes little sense in light of Parker’s story about coming across the paintings in
Guy’s. So either the paintings traveled to Guy’s without Parker’s knowledge, which would contradict
Lockhart’s testimony and Gilman’s essay, or the story Parker puts down in his journal is misleading.
22
Today, eighty-six of these portraits are at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical
Library at Yale University Medical School. Twenty-three remain at the Gordon Museum at Guy’s
Hospital. Gulick writes that the only other portrait is at Boston’s Countway Library, but in a recent
essay Rachman writes that four other paintings (which Gulick seems not to have known about) belong
to Cornell University, and another is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. (156n2; Sander
Gilman has written of five portraits at Cornell [61n9]). I refer to individual portraits by their catalog
number in the Yale system.
23
Some of Lam Qua’s best known sitters “included Chi Ying, the signatory of the Treaty of
Nanking [which ended the first Opium War], Commissioner Lin (Lin Chong), who was ‘responsible
The respect paid Lam Qua did not indicate in any simple way the triumph of a
colonial education, the mark of the civilizability of the Chinese or the production
in Canton of a colonial demimonde of sinified Westerners and Westernized
Chinese. The quality of his work provoked as much anxiety as it did admiration,
as his eventual fallout with his teacher George Chinnery suggests.24 Recalling the
more general Western contempt for Chinese visual art, which especially in the
case of the representation of people “was considered to be ‘a high burlesque’ and
‘either hideous or ludicrous,’” allows us to see how Lam Qua’s skill in portraiture
could constitute a threat to the idea of irreducible cultural difference that would
have sustained a general sense of Western superiority in the mid-nineteenth
century.25 Given that on at least one occasion a Lam Qua painting was mistaken
for the onset of the Opium War,’ as well as Peter Parker, Sir Henry Pottinger, and numerous other
Western and Chinese dignitaries” (Larissa Heinrich, “Handmaids to the Gospel: Lam Qua’s Medical
Portraiture,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia Liu
[Durham, N.C., 1999], 243); his work was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1835, and
appeared in exhibitions in the U.S. and France in the 1840s and 1850s. For more historical background
on Lam Qua, see Carl Crossman, The China Trade: Export Paintings, Furniture, Silver and other Objects
(Princeton, N.J., 1972), 25–39, and Heinrich, 242–44; see also Heinrich’s The Afterlife of Images:
Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Durham, N.C., 2008), whose second
chapter is a version of the essay I cite here. Craig Clunas also discusses Lam Qua briefly in Chinese
Export Watercolors (London, 1984). The differences between Lam Qua’s place in the historical record
and that of Pu Qua, who sold watercolors to George Henry Mason, indicates as much about the
dramatic changes in the interactions and communications between Canton and the West as it does
about the relative difference in each painter’s ability to produce high art in the Western style. By the
mid–nineteenth-century China could be a career for more kinds of men (but only men) than just
merchants and sailors, a truth attested to by the residence in Macao and Canton from 1825 to 1852 of
the English artist George Chinnery, whose portraits and landscapes of southern China and its business
and diplomatic elites constitute a crucial visual record of the experience of Western expatriates in
Canton during this period. That—at least according to some reports—Lam Qua got his start as
painter by studying with Chinnery (after starting as his brush-cleaner) indicates that the “commerce”
between the Western and Chinese communities in Canton included fields of activity and behavior not
linked exclusively to the trade in export goods, and that some members the foreign “community” of
southern China were by the 1830s actively or passively transferring their culture to the Chinese who
worked for or with them.
24
The details on this relationship are sketchy. Crossman seems quite sure that Lam Qua studied
with Chinnery, Rachman and Heinrich less so. Crossman, citing the French traveler “Old Nick” (Paul
Émile Daurand Forgues) attributes the conflict between the two men to Chinnery’s claim that Lam
Qua was a “wretchedly bad painter whose sole merit comes from having stolen from him some models
and some methods,” and the fact that Lam Qua could undercut Chinnery’s prices for portraits, thereby
costing him business (26). In these two complaints—that the Chinese entrepreneur is an imitator who
relies on “secrets” stolen from the West and that labor costs allow him to undercut his Western
competitors—one finds the classic form of a debate that continues to this day.
25
Margaret Jourdain and R. Soame Jenyns, Chinese Export Art in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1950), 15.
for work by the British artist Thomas Sully suggests that commentators who
insisted that Lam Qua “could never entirely eliminate his Chinese mannerisms”
in his portraits were asserting the impossibility of bridging a cultural gap that
looked already to have been fairly well bridged.26
The paintings Lam Qua did of Parker’s patients constitute the most important
single body of his work. Often grotesque, startlingly strange and otherworldly, the
portrayals of human bodies and their enormous, motley tumors force into
shocking visibility the boundaries that separate subjects from objects, the living
from the necrotic, the human from the inhuman. What makes the paintings
unusual in relation to the other work of their place and era has not to do simply
with those tumors, however, nor solely with the fact that the people in the
portraits are poor or sick—the Pu Qua watercolors, after all, featured criminals,
beggars, and manual laborers of all kinds—but rather that these poor and
relatively anonymous people were painted in a style and a medium normally
reserved for a different class of person entirely. Lam Qua’s portraits thus stood
outside not only the conventional ambit of the China trade in visual art, which
favored portrait paintings of powerful merchants and officials, landscapes of the
Canton waterfront, or collections of Chinese types of the sort drawn by Pu Qua,
but also of the normative conventions of pictorial representation as they existed
in the mid-nineteenth century. Their cultural and representational work takes
place within in an economic and aesthetic context in which they were deeply
anomalous.
Before attending to the particular ways in which these portraits collectively
represent Chinese pain, I want to spend some time looking at the features of their
mimetic and historical appearance. Already in the overview of Lam Qua’s place in
the global market for fine art we see how the compositional expertise the portraits
displayed granted them a representational legitimacy (and access to “truth”) that
Pu Qua’s watercolors never had, a difference measured by the fact that Lam Qua’s
portraits did not require lengthy captions to explain them. Lam Qua’s painterly
expertise lies at the core of what Roland Barthes might call his “reality-effect,”
26
Heinrich, 244. Crossman’s chapter on Lam Qua suggests that the portrait of Wu Bingjian
(Howqua) in the Museum of American China Trade was originally believed to have been done by an
Englishman; Heinrich is my source for the Sully anecdote. The cultural difference between “English” and
“Chinese” styles did not simply stem from Western prejudice, but was actually put into commodity form
by Lam Qua’s studio. Sander Gilman cites William Fane de Salis, who commented that in 1848 a “painting
in ‘English’ style was worth £10 and was ‘fashioned with good drawing and perspective’” while a “Chinese
painting” was worth £8 “because it was ‘out of all drawing proportion and perspective’” (61).
namely the degree to which his portraits by virtue of their sheer formal quality
allow their mimetic scenes easily to refer to the realm of truth.27
That such a reality-effect could produce a more or less mistaken reading of the
paintings does not interfere with its efficacy as an effect. As Parker’s experience at
Guy’s suggests, the images lent themselves equally well to two very different inter-
pretations: they could be understood both as evidence of the work of medical
missionary practice—in which case they functioned as the “before” images of a
sequence created by Western intervention—and as evidence of “the way things are”
in China, home of the medical monstrosity, in which case they encoded not so much
a process as a fixed temporal fact about the nature of Chinese life. Though the latter
of these readings was historically wrong in relation to the portraits’ actual produc-
tion by Lam Qua at Parker’s behest, it was representationally “right” in the sense that
it was a legitimate reading of the what the portraits showed and how they showed it,
a correct apprehension of the reality-effect that the portraits generated through their
mastery of the English grand style. What follows begins with a consideration of how
the portraits work in the historically correct reading—the one Parker intended—
before considering how they mean in the throes of the more single-mindedly
synchronic context in which they signified at Guy’s before Parker’s corrective.
Around these two readings, which reveal the paintings’ mimetic relation to time
and to realism, respectively, appears the context in which their representation of
suffering will ultimately be read and understood.
Because the paintings show patients prior to the tumors’ removal, the people
represented in the portraits are captured at a very particular moment in their
lives—the moment at which their physical bodies are about to stop looking like
the portraits that captured them. The disjunction present in the vast majority of
portraits lay therefore between the “person” represented and the tumor he or she
bore; these are portraits of beings whose most salient representational fact has,
shortly after the portraits were made, been removed from their bodies. The
“return” whereby the body, following the operation, becomes or re-becomes a
self without a tumor establishes itself forcefully in the viewer’s imagination, which
grapples therefore with an oscillating awareness of the particular life with the
tumor that must have pre-existed the moment of portrayal and the life without it
that succeeded it. The portraits—which, it bears repeating, show a class of person
who has only rarely in human history been painted in this way—are thus poised
27
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
(Berkeley, 1989).
Fig 3.2 Parker collection,

no. 67. This patient was
never operated on, and
later died. Courtesy of
Yale University, Harvey
Cushing/John Hay
Whitney Medical Library.
on the boundary between life and death. Each of them shows a being whose body
will never again be worth representing with oil on canvas, and which thus appears
at the vanishing point of its own cultural and mediatic presence.
The uncanny quality of the tumor as each painting’s raison d’être and disap-
pearing horizon recomposes the effects of the portraits as a representational
medium. In portraits of cultural elites, the private sitting transforms itself through
oil and canvas into a public object designed to assert the relation between the
private person and the community to which he or she belongs, the portrait thereby
functioning primarily as the public assertion of private being, evidence that the
sitter’s private person mattered enough in the public sphere to be permanently and
painstakingly recorded. But the sitters in the Lam Qua paintings cannot be said to
have had “private” lives, at least not in relation to the world inhabited by Parker,
Lam Qua, and other Canton elites, largely because any such privacy could only be
established in relation to a public life to which they had never had any access.
The patients’ compositional presence might therefore be said to represent the
impossibility of the very relation a portrait conventionally aimed to capture. Or
Fig 3.3 The tumor as viol.

Parker collection, no. 71.
Woo Kinshing, age 49.
Courtesy of Yale Universi-
ty, Harvey Cushing/John
Hay Whitney Medical
Library.
rather, the “public” life that the portraits established for the sitters emerged solely
from the fact of the portraits themselves, which in turn owed their existence to the
presence of tumors whose future absence their function it was to record. This is
why in many cases the name of the sitter is not recorded on the portraits at all. For
a Canton merchant a Lam Qua portrait might have been said to instantiate in
material and representational form the public fact of his private life, a gesture that
made the public visibility of the private the coin with which posterity’s regard
could be purchased. But for Parker’s patients, the operation functioned in reverse:
the portraits instantiated in material form the private fact of the patients’ public
lives, capturing their visibility as public figures immediately prior to its disappear-
ance. In the unlikely event that one of these patients would see his or her own
portrait after its making, the best he or she could hope to say was not, “That is me,”
but “That was me (and is me no longer).”28
28
It is perhaps for this reason that the entire collection includes only one before-and-after
sequence, in which the healed patient makes a reappearance following the amputation of his arm.
Heinrich reads the difference between the two portraits as a narration of the healing benefits of
We see how such an analysis operates at the level of the individual patient
whose presumably tumor-free life after surgery goes unrecorded by either the
portraits or Parker’s case notes. But it functions just as well in relation to the
history of human health in China. The reason these patients had such large
tumors was that Chinese doctors did not perform surgery. Benign external
tumors that in the United States or England would have been removed early,
after only a short period of growth, were allowed in China to grow for years. The
Lam Qua paintings thus record more than the disappearance of particular
tumors; they also record the disappearance of such tumors in general, as the
spread of Western surgical techniques presaged a future in which no tumor
would be allowed to grow to the kind of size that would permit it to be portrayed,
as the tumors so often are in the portraits, as a kind of functional extension of the
body and the landscape in which it appears. The portraits record, then, not only
the disappearing representational horizon of the individual patients, but
also the vanishing medical horizon of a certain experience of the body—an
experience that though it depended on a rather precise set of differences between
Chinese and Western medicine of the mid-nineteenth century nonetheless must
have looked to Western audiences like the fossil remnant of an atavistic, uncanny
past associated with the Chinese nation.29 It is in this sense that the tumors record
and preserve the double experience of time: the lived, individual time required
for them grow on any given body and the imaginary temporal extension of
Western medicine on their subject, Po Ashing. Though this exceptional portrait might be said to
undermine the general principles I am laying out in this chapter, its presence makes sense once we
consider that Po Ashing was, as far as Parker knew (and as he noted with some pride) China’s first
surgical amputee. While the second portrait might therefore be said to represent the felicitous “after”
in which Po Ashing’s tumor has been removed, it is also a painting of the amputation itself. The
sequence’s “interest” in Po Ashing as a person—which might by virtue of its before-after structure
seem to extend from representation to narrative—must therefore be understood both as a single
sequence of two paintings, and as two separate paintings indicating two separate medical conditions,
the tumor and the amputation. His tumor gone, Po Ashing becomes worthy of a portrait a second
time by virtue of his amputation, which allows him once again to cross the representational barrier
and have his privacy made public.
29
As both Gilman and Heinrich have argued, the collection of portraits tends to produce a
slippery metonomy between nation and disease, so that the Chinese patients confirm for the Western
viewer a “double stigma—first, the sign of pathology, and second, the sign of barbarism” that extends
beyond the particularity of the individual to become a feature of China imagined as “the cause and
source itself of the spectacular illnesses” the portraits show (Gilman, 65; Heinrich, 255). Though
Chinese and English fevers might burn equally, the shores of the Thames or the Charles had no
sufferers equivalent to those living in the Pearl River Delta, and that difference, though it might
encourage an increase in sympathetic obligation, did China’s national standing no favors.
their future disappearance. While the former indicated a history of nearly un-
imaginable pain suffered and endured, the latter pointed toward a time of pain
eradicated and defeated. The movement from the first time to the second is the
final and somewhat monotonous subject of all of the portraits, considered from
the historical perspective to which Parker’s influence assigns them.
Under such a perspective, the portraits’ fundamental task was to record the
narrative of Parker’s surgical interventions in China, to mark a temporal “before”
whose subsequent “after” affirmed missionary medicine’s benevolent possibili-
ties. But as Parker’s encounter with the portraits at Guy’s Hospital suggests, such
a diachronic reading could easily disappear behind the dramatic visual impact of
the portraits themselves. For someone who did not know their history, the
portraits instead captured some facts about the state of China and—more
dramatically, given the intensity with which any portrait aims to address the
subjective person of its sitter—an instance of pain being suffered and endured, a
suspended moment of anguish whose intensity, measured by the size of the tumor
and our identification with the object of its attachment, threatens to extend
infinitely the moment of pain the portrait shows, unfurling it to all the temporal
and subjective corners of the sitter’s life. Though such a perspective on the
portraits would miss what, for Parker, they were most fundamentally “about,”
most scholarly interpretations of the portraits’ work have adopted just such a
synchronic point of view, allowing the internal dynamics of the portraits’ com-
position to affect what we know about their originally intended purpose. Indeed,
a complete picture of the portraits’ meaning must recognize the way they generate
at least partly through the actual history of their circulation two seemingly
incompatible interpretations of their representational work: Parker’s diachronic
one, under which the portraits testified to the before and after of his missionary
labor, and a more synchronic vision, which emerges from some combination of
the visual shock provoked by their contents, and the compositional work of the
image that has arranged them.30
30
For an instance of the latter reading in a historical context closer to Parker’s own, consider this
unsigned 1845 review of twenty-eight Lam Qua portraits appearing at the Society for Medical
Improvement in Boston: “These monstrous growths are very serious things to our fellow-creatures
of the Celestial empire. But they are so out of all reasonable proportions, and sprout up in such strange
shapes and places—and China is so far off, and a China man is so much an abstraction to our minds—
and the almond-shaped eyes, the pigtail, the brown-sherry complexion and the Oriental environments
of the sufferers, so blind us to the naked fact of the existence of an unsightly or devouring malady, that
we cannot help looking at them with a little twitching about the levator anguli oris, which if not
inhuman is at least highly unbecoming.” If the tumors were comical—the levator anguli oris muscle is
The synchronic structure of the Lam Qua paintings has been admirably
analyzed by Stephen Rachman, who argues that the images’ energy relies on a
powerful formal movement between two differing aesthetic modes, “likeness”
and “representation,” that apply unequally to the major representational objects
captured on the canvas. Rachman cites one of Parker’s very few mentions of Lam
Qua, which appears in the case notes of a patient named Lew Akin: “I am
indebted to Lam Qua, who has taken an admirable likeness of the little girl and
a good representation of the tumor.” Parker, Rachman writes, was probably using
“likeness in the old, conventional sense as a term of resemblance appropriate to
portraiture (of persons), and representation as a term of resemblance appropriate
to objects, a usage connoting graphic realism—likeness for people, representation
for things” (MM, 145).31 As Rachman goes on to show, the tension in many of the
collection’s paintings between tumor and person figures “two ways of seeing,” one
in which the viewer attends to individual facial features and the “broader
categories of the normative human, the male or female, the old or young,
beautiful or plain, or perhaps the ethnic/racial category of the Chinese,” the
other in which the eye “observes objects by type or classification, be it medical
or some other system” (MM, 146). Rachman goes on to generate from this
observation an extensive reading of the portrait of Parker’s patient Leäng Yen,
who seems to be deliberately hiding her face behind a hand surrounded by a
massive, purpled tumor. Withholding her likeness even as she proffers her
responsible for the lateral movement of the mouth—it was because the “far off,” abstracted qualities of
China and the Chinese “blinded” the viewer to the images’ historical provenance; they become funny
precisely because they are removed from history. What is remarkable in this account is how this
historical removal is accomplished through the narrative catalog of the discrete and specific racial,
cultural, and geographic characteristics of the Chinese—their color of their complexion, their shape of
their eyes, the Manchu queue, and so forth. The removal of the Chinese from the realm of sympathy
occurs because they are “far off,” but this removal actually generates an awareness of the reviewer’s own
inhumanity, which however quickly dismissed suggests that the paintings generated for this reviewer
at least enough of an identification with the Chinese as to require him to dismiss it. Hence the uncanny
and slightly inhuman laughter, whose description in terms of muscular action feels as monstrous as
the tumors. The review appeared in the May 21, 1845, issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
(32.16), and is cited in Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York, 1995), 140.
Weschler cites speculation that the author of the review was Oliver Wendell Holmes.
31
As Gilman has shown, this double regard has something to do with a significant shift in early
nineteenth-century medical illustration from schematic to mimetic representation, coupled with the
belief that since diseases were patient-specific, the “image of the identifiable patient as the bearer of a
specific pathology” was the most effective illustration of any given disease (63). Gilman goes on to
write that by the mid-1800s, the idea of the patient as a specific bearer of disease had been replaced, at
least in the case of tumors, by an emphasis on cellular pathology, leading to the disappearance of the
patient in medical illustration, who was “replaced by the emblem of the disease, the tumor” (65).
representation, refusing the cultural generosity of Lam Qua’s act of portraiture,

the immortality of canvas, Leäng Yen reveals the underlying motivations of the
entire portrait series (she could not have shown her face and withheld the tumor)
and gains for herself some marginal control over her representational fate.32
The tension organizing likeness and representation in the Leäng Yen portrait
appears elsewhere in the collection of paintings, where it tends to operate on two
levels at once. On one hand, the paintings frequently double on their aesthetic
surface the tumors they show with features of the patients’ bodies. In one
portrait, a woman’s pendant earrings mirror the tumor that hangs from her
neck; in another, a young girl’s gangrenous feet are placed parallel to her mother’s
bound ones; in yet another, a man carries his tumor like a viol; and in the
landscapes, “compositional dynamics and structure . . . construct implicit meta-
phorical relationships among the pathology, the human body, and the environ-
ment.”33 In these cases, the movement between representation and likeness
operates at the level of the paintings’ composition, with the tumors’ astonishing
singularity integrated into the visual space of the paintings, made comprehensible
within the aesthetic field by the logic of their repetition. The representational
properties of the tumors—their shape, color, or location—thus find themselves
doubled as the paintings remark their likeness to some other feature of the visual
field in which they appear.
The relation between likeness and representation established in the composi-
tional structure of these images, like the relation between past and future time
established by the paintings’ implied narrative, develops an interpretive
armature for the Lam Qua paintings through the production of a dialectical
relationship between two of its features. These two general interpretive strategies,
the compositional–synchronic and the narrative–diachronic, form at the meta-
32
Rachman reads this gesture against Leäng Yen’s behavior over the course of her medical
treatment, during which she repeatedly refuses to trust or be grateful to Parker for his care. Rachman’s
reading suggests the presence within the collection of moments at which the general Western reception
of the paintings can be undone by an attention to the details of a particular artwork and its relation to
the case study that describes its patient. By moving back and forth between the written material of the
case study—of which Parker is of course still the origin—and the representational field of the painting,
including what it captures of the sitter’s willingness to be painted at all, Rachman generates individual
and historical difference inside the Parker archive. Although the paintings may, following Gilman
and especially Heinrich, be said to domesticate the Chinese people they show by making them the
uncanny allegory of China’s diseased body politic, a sustained attention to a single painting can,
Rachman suggests, show meaning operating outside the framework of Western cultural and scientific
superiority.
33
Heinrich, 256.
Fig 3.4 The pendant

earrings. Parker
collection, unnumbered.
Yang She, age 20. Courtesy
of Yale University, Harvey
Cushing/John Hay
critical level a dialectic of their own, in which the paintings move, as indeed
they have in historical fact, between interpretations focused on their relation to
the medical missionary project and their relation to the generic history of
painterly form. Neither of these interpretations seems bound to get the upper
hand. They belong to different conceptual fields; and the full range of the
paintings’ meaning operates in the space between those fields, which it therefore
includes.
But all this interpretation leaves behind what the paintings actually show, or
would show, if they were portraits and not historical documents on missionary
medicine, or purely formal expressions of a relation between likeness and image.
The most striking thing about the portraits as portraits is that the people who
appear in the paintings do not in any way “express” their pain. Their absolutely
stoic, uncannily undisturbed faces look out from the paintings as though daring
the viewer to mention the tumor that accompanies them.
To return to the language of representation and likeness, we can begin to think
about this representational situation by noticing that it emerges from the ways in
Fig 3.5 The tumor and/as

breast. Parker collection,
no. 23. Courtesy of Yale
University, Harvey
Cushing/John Hay
which any given sitter’s likeness represents, or fails to represent, a subjective

awareness of the tumor that the paintings represent as part of his or her body.
The dialectic of representation and likeness, so driven in the case of the paintings’
compositional structure to establish a relation between the tumor and its land-
scape, seems to founder at precisely the moment at which it would seem most
necessary: there where it would indicate to us the relation between the person and
the thing, there where the person who is the paintings’ putative subject could
express some subjective relation to the object growing on and out of his or her
body. The overall effect of this absence or indifference is to make the subject’s
experience of the tumor disappear, and thus to suggest that Parker’s patients bore
their tumors with remarkable stoicism. But this stoicism has the curious effect of
divorcing what one might call the objective representation of pain—its evidence,
its “representation”—from the subjective one that would locate that pain in the
living and active consciousness of a human body—its likeness. Seen from this
angle the relationship between pain’s representation and its likeness, its objective
dimension and its subjective one, will recall the entire dialectical structure
established by pain’s twining of the ontological and the cultural. Pain’s tie to the
pure reality of being, its demand that we cry that reality out to the world and have
it recognized in the space of culture, here seems subject to a representational short
circuit, in which the transition that would take us from objective evidence of pain
(the tumors) to their subjective expression (in faces) does not take place.
Larissa Heinrich’s response to that short circuit has been to attribute the
patients’ apparent stoicism to the demands of the English grand style.34
A reasonable explanation. But it cannot account for the appearance of that
same disjunction between objective and subjective pain elsewhere in the Parker
archive, most notably as a feature of the Medical Missionary Society’s surgical
case reports, whose written form owed little to the strictures of painterly styles
familiar to Lam Qua. Heinrich supplements her mention of the English grand
manner with the speculation that paintings also communicated “the vision of the
Chinese patient that Parker wanted to communicate to his Western audience, the
vision that Parker himself had of what it meant to be Chinese and to suffer from
what seemed inconceivably horrible pathologies” (251). This is closer to what
I will suggest, though I will not be making Parker the exclusive intending agent
of the representational material in either the paintings or the case reports.
Instead, as I shall suggest in what follows, the division between subjective and
objective pain that appears in both the portraits and the case studies intervenes
philosophically inside the dialectic of pain that constituted Parker’s major cultural
context for understanding his Chinese patients, where it exposes the limits of
that context in ways so radical that Parker can only barely register them.
In returning the paintings to the larger context of the archive, I follow the
dictates of their own history of circulation. Though the portraits strike us today as
by far the most spectacular emblems of Parker’s life work, they were not histori-
cally the major form through which Parker’s contemporaries received word of the
labors of the medical missionaries. That word came rather through Parker’s
surgical case studies, which were included among a variety of budgetary and
administrative information in the series of quarterly reports on the state of the
Medical Missionary Society, which also were regularly reprinted in the Chinese
Repository (Canton’s expatriate news organ) and distributed in the United States.
It was the case studies, far more than the paintings, that were the source of
34
Heinrich calls the “unexpected lack of emotion” the subjects show “perhaps the single most
striking feature of the paintings as a body,” and ascribes this lack to the general stoicism of the English
grand style, in which “trappings of identity were projected out onto the attire and setting in which the
subject was placed,” as well as to shifts in the habits of Western medical illustration (250).
Parker’s international reputation and of information on the state of Chinese life

and medical care—they were, in fact, the very “instructive documents” that the
medical missionaries had imagined their society would provide.35
In the years leading up to the discovery of chemical anesthetics in 1846, as you
will see in the citations below, Parker recorded with relentless attention his
patients’ reactions to the pain of surgery.
During the operation to amputate Leäng Yen’s arm: “The patient after her
decision was fully formed contemned [sic] the idea of pain, and at the
moment of sawing the bone inquired when that part of the process would
take place.” (First and second, 60)
“Twelve patients with [hare-lips] have been received, and in several in-
stances in one week from the operation the patient has been quite cured. The
fortitude of these little children has been very noticeable, they appearing, often
through the whole operation, almost insensible to pain.” (“First report,” 9)
Case no. 1675, on Leang Ashing, aged 27, for removal of facial tumor:
“During the incisions through the integuments and the dissecting out of
the tumor he did not move a muscle, change a feature of his countenance,
or draw one long breath, so that apprehensions were even entertained that
he was insensible; but if spoken to he answered deliberately and correctly.”
(“Fourth quarterly report,” 4)
Woo She (case no. 4016), for the removal of a cancerous breast: “Her
fortitude exceeded all that I have yet witnessed. She scarcely uttered a
groan during the extirpation, and before she was removed from the table,
clasped her hands and, with an unaffected smile, cordially thanked the
gentlemen who assisted on the occasion.” (“Seventh quarterly report,” 8)
35
Parker’s reputation traveled mainly through written descriptions of his medical work; the
paintings, as a number of commentators note, were rarely shown in public. (A proposed exhibition of
the paintings in the 1970s was canceled [see Peter Josyph, “The Missionary Doctor and the Chinese
Painter,” MD (August 1992), 6.]; Rachmann writes that the paintings were “rarely seen by the public or
by scholars” [156n2].) The case reports were by contrast widely reprinted, appearing in public letters
like the one Parker wrote to John Abercrombie, in the published annual minutes of the Medical
Missionary Society and in the Chinese Repository, a monthly magazine edited by Bridgman, which was
the main source of news about China’s foreign missionary community both in China and abroad. Like
the paintings, the case studies functioned as both testaments to Parker’s surgical work and as
ethnographic documents that taught readers about the people and diseases of China.
Case no. 4903, Choo Yihleäng, a shoemaker, for removal of a tumor on

the right side of his neck: “During the operation the patient was perfectly
collected, and did not utter a groan: spoke with natural voice when spoken
to, and repeatedly requested the operater might not be alarmed.” (“Eighth
quarterly report,” 11)
Yáng Káng, 35, facial tumor: “The patient discovered great fortitude,
coolly remarking on commencement of the first incision, ‘it hurts,
doctor.’” (Report of the MMS for 1844, 4)
“The patient bore the operation with heroic fortitude, not seeming to
notice the incisions, and remarked shortly after, that he had not suffered
much.” (Report of the MMS for 1844, 10)
For amputation of the arm of Kwo Sı́hái: “The amputation was speedily
performed, and the patient sustained the shock remarkably well, consider-
ing his loss of blood, and the time that had elapsed. He spoke in a natural
voice the moment after.” (Report of the MMS for 1844, 17)
Like the paintings, these case studies present a Chinese relation to pain defined
by the representation of a startling and quasi-heroic stoicism. And like the
paintings, they generate that stoicism by presenting a startling disjunction be-
tween tumor and person, representation and likeness. The patient’s “natural”
voices, like the expressionless faces of the portraits, communicate again and again
the act of nontranslation (the nonact of translation?) whereby the objective
evidence of pain does not appear in the subjective response to it.36
Recalling Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the representational structure through
which pain tends to move into language, we might say that what is at stake
in these descriptions is the relation between perception and mimesis, be-
tween the objective visual evidence of pain and its subjective expression.
This distinction exposes the difference between what Scarry calls pain’s
36
Heinrich is extrapolating, I think, when she refers to Parker’s “fixation with—and awe of—
what he perceived as a peculiarly Chinese ability to cope with extreme pain” (251). Nowhere in the case
reports does Parker actually comment on how he feels about the Chinese “ability to cope with extreme
pain”; nowhere, in fact, does he even seem to notice that he keeps noticing the Chinese reaction to
pain, or suggest that he considers this to be a Chinese “ability.” The peculiar disjunction between
Parker’s description of individual relations to pain and his nonreflection on it will ground much of my
analysis below.
“language of agency” whose origin is a literal or metaphorical wound—a

description of a surgery, the picture of a tumor—and the subjective expres-
sion of pain whose origin is not the wound as such but rather the subjective
experience that the wound causes. In narrative terms, the difference between
these two is like the difference between description and narration, the one an
unmotivated recitation of facts whose model is a totally objective realism of
the type later attempted by the French new novel, the other a guided and
intentional tour whose presumed mimetic telos is the intention of a narrat-
ing or narrated subject.
In general, one might say that the language of pain operates in the gap
between these two representational modes. Any given cultural relationship to
pain governs the representational work that translates from one side of the
gap to the other, establishing the rules for both the content and the form of
pain-language that determine, for instance, how loudly it is appropriate to
react to a hangnail, what forms of speech count as suitable expressions of
grief, and so on. Such protocols establish a relationship between what one
might call the descriptive “evidence” of pain—the visible or invisible wound—
and the narrative “expression” of it, in which legitimate expressions earn the
subject the right to have his or her pain recognized, tended to, sympathized
with, and the like, and illegitimate ones are written off as complaints or not
recognized at all.37
Any given expression of pain is thus not simply a single representation, but an
act that insofar as it is a representation expresses the general cultural aesthetic that
determines it. Such an aesthetic does not just determine the appropriate cultural
content of any given expression of pain; rather it organizes an entire field of
relationships between what one might call the “public” evidence of pain and its
subjective expressions. The wound’s metonymic work, which appears in its
physical appearance, the content of a description, or in the case of psychic pain,
in the reporting of an acknowledged fact (a death in the family), produces a kind
of cultural baseline against which the subjective representation of pain can be
evaluated. This movement between perceptual evidence of pain on one hand and
its subjective representation on the other is what I am calling pain’s cultural
aesthetic: the set of codes that organizes the movement from description to
narration, from the presence of pain established through the virtual objectivity
37
Unsurprisingly, differences in this context will array themselves unequally according to social
structures like race, class, and gender; and in the case of pain especially, also, in relation to age.
of a cultural norm to the narration of a relation to that pain—“It hurts, doc-

tor”—that comes from a singular subjective perspective.38 Parker’s reports on
his patients’ reactions to surgical pain are not simply, then, records of a set of
medical facts, or even evidence for cultural differences in the experience of
pain. Because the subjective representation of pain necessarily involves the
figural transfer of interior to exterior, intention to expression, the patients (as
“characters” in the reports) can be said to be expressing a representational style
that the reports’ narrating subject simultaneously registers and does not recog-
nize as such.
As a style for reacting to pain, the attitude Parker’s patients express can be
most simply described by the fact that it splits the “pain” that Parker recognizes
merely by looking at the tissue damage he sees—that is, pain’s purely descriptive
or “realistic” evidence—from the subjective narrations of face and voice that
Parker expects to reflect that damage. From the perspective of an aesthetic that
expects and encourages the mimetic transfer from inside to outside, the style
Parker’s patients embody registers most intensely as an absence or a failure
to represent, as the words “expressionless” (to describe the faces) and “natural”
(to describe the voices) suggest. Parker’s descriptions of these patients thus
continually registers the absence of an artificial—that is, human-made or subjec-
tive—representational gesture that would carry the physical damage done by his
surgery into the realm of expression, that would, in other words, and very much
like Parker himself, encode the objective details before him with some degree of
narration or character. The most remarkable thing about Parker’s frequent
observation about this absence or failure is that he himself never seems to notice
it. He never, that is, turns his observations regarding specific patients into a
general theory of the Chinese relation to suffering and, indeed, would insist in his
1841 fundraising letter—despite having recorded evidence that suggested precisely
the opposite—that, Chinese gouts and English ones being equally painful, the
Chinese suffered just as the English did.
In using “style” to mean something other than a literary style, I wish to insist
both on the strict representational qualities of what the patients do in Parker’s
case reports and to grant the word “style” an expanded set of meanings that
38
These rules govern mimetic form as well as its content. Parker’s mention of the man who says
that “It hurts, doctor,” is telling: Yáng Káng’s phrase bears reporting in the case study because of the
surprising divergence between the information produced by its content and the insouciant coolness of
its “coolly” delivered form. The phrase calls attention to itself as a representation of pain that does not
call formal attention to itself as a representation of pain.
include “attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness.”39 I would like to recognize,

in other words, that modes of being are expressive enactments of the subjective
and cultural forces behind human activity. By suggesting that Parker’s Chinese
patients express a style, I mean, therefore, to find in moments of profound bodily
crisis something other than a “raw” or “natural” reaction to the pain of the body
as reality’s barest fact, and thus to open once again the possibility that even pain
is, despite the dominating contemporary sense of its deep and unquestionable
realness, the product of a set of representational and cultural codes that govern
precisely how that realness establishes itself in the real and, thus, the relation
between subjective and objective reality.
Doing so allows contemporary readers to recognize these Chinese patients as
something other than the abused representamens of Lam Qua’s portraits or
Parker’s case reports. Though of course those portraits and reports constitute
the only access anyone today can have to Parker’s patients, it nonetheless seems
worth trying to acknowledge the patients’ status as “makers” of a relation to pain
rather than reading them exclusively as the hapless objects of an aesthetic
apparatus (portrait painting) or nonfictional genre (the medical case study).
I say this not to make some well-meaning claim about restoring the subaltern
to speech, but rather to recognize the historical fact that these patients seem to
have affected Parker’s case studies beyond what he as their controlling subject was
capable of perceiving in them.
Parker’s patients did not, of course, conceive of themselves as the producers of
a style; nor did Parker ever indicate his conscious apprehension of their doing so.
Nonetheless, the fact that he so frequently reports on his patients’ natural voices
suggests that something in their reactions to surgery spoke to him an important
cultural difference in the experience of pain, a difference that he found it
necessary repeatedly to describe. As far as lived experience is concerned, the
visitors at Canton’s Ophthalmic Hospital surely felt their pain enough; people
came to the hospital because they wanted to be cured, not because they wanted to
demonstrate for the famous doctor the legendary stoicism of the Chinese, or to
exhibit for academic readers of the coming centuries some new ideology of the
anesthetic. In thinking about the patients as generating, however unconsciously,
something that Parker (also unconsciously) perceived and described in ways that
can in this present be perceived and described as a representational style, I wish
39
Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York, 2006), 2.
On the philosophical grounds for a far broader analytic sense of style than most literary critics use, see
chapter 2 of Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978).
simply to suggest that they belong—just as Parker and Lam Qua do—to the
general historical tradition that ties sympathy to China in which every subject of
this book, from Adam Smith to George Mason to Peter Handke, also takes part.
Some measure of the importance of this representational mode comes if we
look at what happens to Parker’s surgical reports after the introduction of
chemical anesthetics. In the 1848 report on the activities of the Ophthalmic
Hospital, Parker notes that he had “through the politeness of D. N. Spooner,
Esq., . . . received from Boston the apparatus of C. Jackson, the author of this
discovery, and a good supply of sulphuric Ether, with a letter from the latter
gentleman explaining particularly his mode of procedure.”40 Parker tested the
procedure on a farmer (case no. 25,870): “In forty-three seconds, the muscles of
his arm suddenly relaxed and he ceased simultaneously to inhale the ether, and in
a state of insensibility he was laid back upon the table his head still being
elevated. . . . [he] had no recollection of the incisions during the operation.”
Parker reported several other cases in which anesthesia was used in the fifteenth
and sixteenth reports, which cover the years 1848 to 1851, though he seems to have
switched from sulphuric ether to chloroform in 1849.41
This development produces what social scientists call a “natural experiment,”
an occasion to test the hypothesis that one of the major features of the case
studies (and the Lam Qua paintings) is their representation of the Chinese
patients’ relation to pain, their representation of a “style” of representation in
which the perceptual marks of pain do not translate into the mimetic surfaces—
the faces and voices—that conventionally represent pain by moving it from fact
to experience. The following are reports from operations in which Parker used
chemical anesthesia:
“After inhaling the vapor three minutes, though able to return an intelli-
gent answer to questions put to him, the tumor was quickly extirpated
without sensibility either to the knife in making the incisions and dissec-
tion, or the needle in applying the sutures.”
40
Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in China; And Fifteenth Report
of its Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton for the years 1848 and 1849 (Canton, 1848), 13. Parker’s attribution
of the invention of anesthesia to Charles Jackson was, though he may not have known it, a highly
controversial statement. By 1849, the U.S. Congress had taken up the question of who invented the
procedure (the other major contender was William Morton), though it never resolved the issue.
Jackson died in an insane asylum; Morton died a pauper.
41
Fifteenth Report, 13–14.
“the stone was extracted, the patient being under the influence of
chloroform. As he revived, he asked when the incision was to be made,
and was answered by showing him the calculus.”
“During the operation she seemed as if in a quiet sleep, and remained so

some minutes after the arteries were tied and the sutures applied, when on
being spoken to, she awoke, and the natural expression returning to her
countenance, she glanced her eyes downwards, and with a smile remarked,
‘I do not see the tumor!’”42
The story-form of the last two citations became a staple of the surgical report
in the era immediately after the invention of anesthesia: an operation is per-
formed, and the patient awakes to ask when the thing is going to start.43 It is not
surprising that this structure would reappear in the Chinese context. What is
remarkable, however, is that these reports so closely resemble the ones Parker
made regarding his patients in the years before anesthesia’s discovery. Consider
particularly the case of Leäng Yen, who had her right arm amputated above the
elbow: “The patient . . . at the moment of sawing the bone inquired when that
part of the process would take place.” Here a patient whose arm is being sawed
off without anesthesia asks the very question that became the classic trope of
the anesthesia success story. The narrative structure that functions in the first
instance as testimony to the remarkable fortitude of the Chinese becomes in the
second proof of the miracle of chloroform.
It would perhaps be too much to suggest on this evidence that one of the
effects of anesthesia in Parker’s practice was to erase the visible appearance of the
representational style Parker’s patients so expressed in the years before anesthesia.
But it would be less ridiculous to assert that the growing use of anesthetics was in
the process in the mid-nineteenth century of removing the subject from the
operating table, of turning the surgical procedure from a confrontation between
two people into an encounter between a professional and a thing. Once a patient
42
Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in China; And Fourteenth
Report of its Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton for the years 1848 and 1849, 12; Minutes of the Annual
Meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in China; And Fifteenth Report of its Ophthalmic Hospital at
Canton for the years 1848 and 1849, 17; and Minutes of Two Annual Meetings of the Medical Missionary
Society in China; Including the Sixteenth Report of its Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton for the years 1850
and 1851, 21–22.
43
See for instance the material in Julie M. Fenster, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s
Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (New York, 2001).
was anesthetized, his or her personal or cultural relation to surgical pain became
irrelevant to the surgeon’s experience of the operation—indeed, it became less
than irrelevant; it disappeared. The “natural expression” on the countenance of
one of Parker’s patients following anesthesia exhibits neither her cultural relation
to pain nor some chosen representational organization of body and self, tumor
and person. It indicates quite simply the effects of anesthesia, which in removing
the patient from consciousness also removed the body from a “natural,” that
is, a living, self (and so Parker at one point refers to a patient “reviving” from
anesthetic sleep). It is telling that the reconciliation of the body and the self
indicating by the patient’s “natural expression” is described by Parker as a
“return.”
One way to think about the change in Parker’s case reports, then, is to
consider it an indication of a more general anesthetic shift that defines modern
medicine’s relation to the surgical patient, who becomes under anesthesia merely
a body-thing, a representation with no likeness. Given that the aesthetic, repre-
sentational dimension of the language and cultural experience of pain depends on
the presence of a subject who brings the represented “inside” of felt pain “out-
side” into the communal world, then, one might say that the pain of surgery
under anesthesia, because it is not experienced by a controlling subject, ceases to
be representable.
But this does not explain why the language in which Parker described his
operations remained unmodified by the enormous representational change that
anesthesia made. It is tempting, because of the historical scope of the idea, to
claim that the Chinese patients functioned as the proleptic anticipation of life
after anesthesia. A reading along these lines would suggest that in the experi-
ence of performing surgery on his patients, the cultural differences that sepa-
rated Parker from the Chinese essentially functioned as a kind of advance
warning, the Chinese bodies he dealt with thereby becoming figures of an
anesthetized modernity defined by the triumph over pain, or, more dystopi-
cally, by the total death of human feeling. I will have more to say about the
relation between an anesthetizing modernity and the aesthetics of Chinese
suffering in chapter 6. For now, however, I wish to propose that the strange
nondifference tying Parker’s pre-anesthetic descriptions of Chinese pain to his
post-anesthetic ones marks, by way of the negation of difference, the most
profoundly “unrealistic” moment of the Parker archive, a moment when the
putatively objective, descriptive language of his reports conceals a difference
that it nonetheless leaves out in the open. This moment of blindness to the
stylistic register in which his patients’ relation to pain functions thus doubles,
or allegorizes, the very stylistic structure (of description that does not “nar-
rate”) that it does not, or cannot, notice.44
It is, finally, by suggesting that the relation to pain these patients express in
Parker’s prose is also as a style, a style that his work obsessively represents but
does not recognize, that I can in turn propose that the case studies constitute not
simply a set of representations in the mixed genre of medical case report (focused
on representations of disease and surgeries) and character study (focused on the
patients’ “likenesses”), but also an allegory of representationality itself.45 In this
last role, the patients’ style—a style whose major aesthetic feature is the non-
translation of inside to outside, perception to mimesis, and thus the refusal of
Parker’s assumptions about the proper representational relationship between
44
The word “skeuomorph” names an aspect of an object’s design that mimics an important
feature of one of its cultural predecessors, as for instance when light bulbs shaped like candle flames
are used in chandeliers, or when a computer operating system organizes its zeroes and ones into “files”
and “folders.” Skeuomorphs are, as Nicholas Gessler has suggested, profoundly metaphorical, and the
metaphors they encode aim to provide users with information that will help accustom them to a
new technology (“Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms,” http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/gessler/
cv-pubs/98skeuo.htm [accessed November 25, 2008]). By producing this information on the surface of
the new object itself, rather than in, say, a user’s manual, skeuomorphs materially indicate a cultural
and technological lineage within which a new object can be experienced and understood. If Parker’s
use of the language of fortitude after 1848 is skeuomorphic, it is so because in retaining the descriptive
features of the language he used before anesthesia, it encodes the novel experience of the anesthetized
patient within a history of relationships to pain to which it may in fact not belong. That is, even though
from my perspective the relation between Parker’s patients and their pain, considered as a question of
representational style, changes radically before and after anesthesia, Parker may have preserved the
descriptive language he used in the pre-anesthetic cases because it had established in advance a
representational framework within which he could understand what anesthesia did. In this sense, of
course, it is actually the case that the Chinese patients functioned for him as the proleptic vision of life
after anesthesia. But they did not do so because Parker anticipated in seeing their reactions to pain the
development of a world in which chemical anesthesia was widespread, but rather because when it came
time to describe that new world and its effects on his operating table, he borrowed a descriptive
language with which he was already comfortable to do so. Though Parker never gives any indication of
this fact anywhere in the case reports, it may in fact be the case that for him the arrival of anesthesia
was intimately connected at some conscious level with a relation to his Chinese patients’ relation to
pain. The sheer retention of the language of fortitude suggests that this was so. But this does not tell us
anything about the representational style that can be discerned in the pre-1848 case studies; it simply
tells us that for Parker (and perhaps for the readers of his case studies over the years) the skeuo-
morphic qualities of the language he retained allowed patient behavior under anesthesia to be
understood through an intellectual and linguistic matrix that borrowed from the patient-behavior
to which he was already accustomed.
45
For an essay that connects the development of the genre of medical case study to the
development of a more general “humanitarian narrative” driven by its “reliance on detail as the sign
of truth,” and which includes the modern novel, see Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the
Humanitarian Narrative,” The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 177.
pain and subjectivity—opens up inside the generic conventions of Parker’s case

reports the possibility of telling a different kind of story about pain than any one
that Parker could conceive. A reading of Parker’s case studies that finds there the
presence of a representational style that seems to present the opening gambit
in the now-classic story about Chinese insensitivity to pain can thus, with a
small shift in perspective, be seen simultaneously to produce the possibility of
an actively generated representational style whose very assumptions about the
proper relationship between pain and subjectivity imply a wholesale rejection of
an aesthetic model predicated on the opposition between inside and outside,
experience and expression. Such a violation of the classic codes of Western
aesthetics could perhaps be described as an a-aesthetic, not a refusal but simply
an absence of the aesthesis that represents representation as the movement from
presence to mimesis.
Through the conjunction of their undermining of a conventional mode of
representation, and through their belonging to one, Parker’s patients figure
the larger historical work of the perception of Chinese pain, and so ravel the
themes of the book as a whole. They do so, following this reading, by representing
for us the apparent possibility of nonrepresentation, of an “epistemological status
of the body,” to use Asad’s phrase, that does not return us to the kind of
representational relation that we (or Parker) expect to see when we think of the
relation between pain and language. If one imagines this nonrepresentation, this
a- or nonaesthetic, as the “resistance” of the patients themselves, one can slide
fairly easily into a conclusion of the type made popular by work done in the
wake of theories of postcolonial hybridity, in which any resistance to interpreta-
tion (or to representation) is recognized as the deflection of an aggressive
imperialist mimesis. Such a reading has the unfortunate effect, however, of
minimizing the very resistance it finds, since in making the resistance to repre-
sentation a subjective gesture, it returns it to the very field of representation it had
abandoned, the nonaesthetic now “representing” (in a political as well as a
mimetic sense) the subaltern’s subject position and his or her agency in relation
to it. It seems crucial therefore to resist such a return, allowing the non-style
I have identified here to exist without subjective attribution, a gesture that
permits it to retain much of its strangeness and indeed to enact at the level of
this interpretation the very thing that makes this nonstyle so interesting in its
own historical context, namely the “refusal” (which is not a refusal, but an
absence or a negation, a nothing not opposed to a something) to cross the
mimetic line that carries us so comfortably from description to narration,
objectivity to subjectivity.
It seems better then to attribute all this work to the archive as such, personify-
ing the collection of documents and not the actual people involved, while
remaining aware of the ways in which the archive does and does not resemble a
human being. And here one might remark that the most important singular
feature of the representational structure the archive shows us lies in the seemingly
paradoxical confrontation of the fact of its incessant recording of the nonaesthetic
scene (all those paintings and case reports) without ever becoming capable of
registering or commenting on the thing that it so obsessively records. As though
the fact of nonmimesis were the psychological or historical blind spot of the
archive as such, the symptom to which it was doomed to return again and again
without ever being able to recognize it. If the archive were a person, it might
resolve this trauma—a sort of primal scene of its own nonexistence, of the
negation of the fact of recording and representation on which it relies—on the
psychiatrist’s couch, where over the course of a series of expensive conversations
it would discover that it had been relentlessly fleeing toward the theoretical site of
its own disappearance, a problem it would eventually appear to resolve by having
an affair with its analyst.
As for us, it may make more sense to attribute the blind spot to the historical
complex that bound Parker to his patients, and both these to Lam Qua, and think
of it as a moment in which the encounter with a profound epistemological and
mimetic otherness was simultaneously registered and ignored. Both the registra-
tion and the ignoring tell us something about what was happening at that instant:
the registration of this difference draws our attention to the assumption, present
in Parker just as much as in the more recent work of Scarry, that pain is
inextricably bound up with a certain kind of representation, particularly repre-
sentation of a type that links subject to object, culture to ontology, in an
unshakeable and necessary dialectic. When that dialectic does not appear, we
feel as though were are in the presence of the alien, the inhuman: which may
explain why Parker, so devoted to thinking Chinese humanity as equal to his own,
could simply not discuss at a metadescriptive level the very thing his case studies
kept describing. Its capture in the archive, which registers with an indifferent
precision the being-there-ness of this troubling difference inside the real, owes
something to the indexical logic of the photograph. In detective stories, the
inadvertent clue, arrested unconsciously in the background of the image that
indexes the real beyond all human intention, tends to resolve with an impeccable
neatness the mysteries of plot and action. Less true here. But if the Parker archive
does clue us into something, it is the possibility that the kind of sympathetic
exchange required by the enormous shift in Western “cognitive style,” so caught
up in the Chinese case with the history of economic exchange, relied strongly on a
relation to representational exchange focused on the objective appearance and
subjective narration of pain. As the book progresses, and especially beginning in
chapter 5, I will cleave more closely to the trail indicated by this clue, drawing out
through discussions of representation and mimesis this interesting third dimen-
sion of the history of modern sympathy, a dimension which I will ultimately
argue indicates the limits of our contemporary thinking about pain and repre-
sentation, and shows how fully our understanding of pain’s ontological dialectic
belongs—even when it seems to exceed it—to the discourse of sympathy and
China from which it has emerged here.
4. The Calculi of Suffering
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment at which a cultural stereotype acquires

enough mass to snowball down the historical hill under its own power, generating
through its tumbling the amount of anecdotal “evidence” needed to qualify it as
a scientific fact. If one could locate such a moment in the history of Chinese
insensitivity to pain—particularly in the language of Chinese insensitivity to
personal pain, rather than the stereotype of indifference to others—it would lie
somewhere just beyond Parker’s records of his time in China, which would relate
to it as weather to an avalanche, indirectly. Both Heinrich and Gilman have
made compelling claims about the effects Parker’s case studies and the Lam Qua
paintings must have had on the audiences that saw them, about the ways in which
they reproduced the general language of primitivity and barbarism that governed
imperialist racism. But their analyses cannot extend to Parker himself; though he
paid for the paintings and wrote the case studies, it remains utterly unclear what
he himself thought he was doing thereby, or whether he believed any conclusions
about China should be drawn from his life’s work. Parker’s continuous writing
about his own activities never moves from description to narration, one might
say, never makes a connection between what he did and what it meant, either to
him or to some larger history, just as, barring a few moments of religious crisis
during his years of theological study at Yale, he almost never discussed his own
interior life.46
46
As Gulick, his biographer, puts it, “No great subtlety is evident in Parker’s self-analysis, but we
do find abundant commitment and dynamism” (12). Even Parker’s letters to his family from Canton
bury their emotional content under the strictures of reportorial neutrality; a letter dated April 2, 1867,
This failure to plumb his own motivations or to discuss the meaning and value
of his Chinese experience produces in the entire Parker archive a strange blank-
ness on the subject of his person. That blankness contrasts sharply with the
profoundly readable surfaces of the paintings or the case reports, or even the
abject weirdness of the archive’s strangest objects, a few boxes of urinary calculi—
kidney stones—which in all cases signify loquaciously, encoding and figuring
the historical conditions from which they emerged and the people whose bodies
they metonymize, synecdochize, and otherwise represent. It is precisely this
contrast that makes the archive so compelling, since the archival materials’
complex jabber seems to be the exact thing that Parker himself—though he
registered it, wrote it down, paid for it to be painted, or collected it in boxes—
never really responded to.
In this subjectively neutral relation to the objects and writings he collected, the
Parker archive also develops what one might call a style, in the sense of a
recognizable stance or attitude, that does not differ much from the one Parker’s
patients produced in their representations of pain. Just as “it hurts, doctor”
registered the physical presence of pain at the level of content without trans-
lating that same presence into the voice’s tonal form, Parker’s archival collection
registers his life’s experiential content—operations performed, patients seen,
stones removed—without ever giving that content anything but its most “natu-
ral,” that is, its blankest and most “objective” form and expression. From this
perspective, the archive itself, considered as Parker’s life’s work, restages the
relationship to pain that seemed to fascinate him in the case studies, so that the
material he collected testifies as much as anything could to the nineteenth
century’s “obsession with pain” without ever bringing the material or perceptual
evidence of that obsession over into the subjective or historical foreground, or
suggesting, except implicitly, that it was worth collecting at all.47
What the archive does explicitly say, however, it says by virtue of its presence at
Yale, where the sheer material accumulation of words and objects it contains
testifies as much as any porcelain cup or lacquered fan to its imbrication in a
process of international exchange. That exchange participated only obliquely
in the major forms of international trade that dominated the American encounter
for instance, opens with a full page explaining how many letters Parker has written to his family
without receiving a reply, followed by this sentence: “I do not complain very much, but mention the
facts.”
47
James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind
(Baltimore, 1980), 80.
with China in this era, its marginality measured by the fact that though Lam
Qua’s portraits of Canton elites hang in several East Coast museums, his paintings
of Parker’s patients are almost all owned by university libraries. But the collec-
tion’s status as an object of cross-cultural exchange should not for all that be
ignored. It was, after all, in the narrative codification of a hypothetical financial
transaction between a penniless European and a nameless Chinese mandarin that
the entire cognitive structure undergirding Parker’s Medical Missionary Society
was most economically disseminated and thought. The Parker archive does not,
to be sure, contain any sort of Chinese fortune, but the information and the
representations Parker collected are in fact the material return for Parker’s saving
the lives of any number of Chinese patients (some of them actual mandarins)—as
he, Colledge and Bridgman had predicted when they declared that the case books
he kept would “in time be curious and instructive documents, and such as will
enable to glance at the penetralia of domestic and social life in China.”
In this context, perhaps the archive’s most representative objects are the forty
kidney stones collected in yellowing plastic boxes and stored, like the Lam Qua
paintings, in the library’s basement. These dumb accretions of calcium, magne-
sium, and phosphate, at least one of which Parker cut from a corpse, are the
material testaments to the economy of Chinese death and Western fortune that
constituted the philosophical and practical ground of Parker’s twenty years in
Canton.48 Like paintings or the case studies, these quite literal “penetralia” of
Chinese life bind objective pain—the largest of the stones measures seven inches
around—to a total negation of subjectivity, since in the case of the stones the
possibility of subjective narration has been completely evacuated from the
material surface of the object, whose “naturalness” indicates profound bodily
suffering but does not express it. Though these calculi do not in any way
document the military violence of the wars that made possible Parker’s continued
48
In the Sixteenth Report of the MMS, Parker writes of a patient who died of complications
produced by his stone that “with some difficulty the consent of his relatives was obtained to extract the
stone, which, considering the prejudice of the Chinese against anything like an autopsy, may be
regarded as a triumph” (11). Parker tells another story in which his request to pay a family to acquire
the corpse of a former patient for dissection is refused (see Heinrich, 265–66); Leäng Yen at one point
demands that Parker pay her for the right to operate, which Parker does not do (see Rachman, 150).
The paintings were the result of a similar negotiation: Parker’s memory of Lam Qua’s claim “that as
there is no charge for ‘cutting’ [surgery], he can make none for painting,” also figures objects whose
most profound mode of visibility has to do with their representational work as the subjects of barter
and the bearers of economic value. As Rachman notes, the claim must be read in the context of
Parker’s having noted in 1851 that he had paid Lam Qua twenty-five dollars for “paintings of tumors”
(143). The “no charge” line appears on the first page of Josyph, and on Rachman 142.
work at the Ophthalmic Hospital, their mere presence at Yale collocates the
history of the best aspects of West’s humanitarian narrative with the economically
motivated violence that made that narrative’s expansion possible; they would not
be in a box at the library, after all, had the Opium Wars not kept Chinese territory
“open” to Western missionaries; and yet they would surely have killed at least
some of their sufferers, had that opening not taken place.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the calculus that balanced Chinese lives
against Western money would be taken up in a far more literal and cruder
form, as American politicians and labor organizers, borrowing from the general
language of Chinese indifference to pain that Parker’s archive at its dumbest
level represents, used that indifference to justify physical and legal violence
against immigrant workers in California. To see that violence as another iteration
of the equation between Western financial success and the death of someone
Chinese is to recognize the hypothetical murder of the Chinese mandarin and
even Parker’s box of urinary calculi as the outmoded effects of a less competitive
age. How such an iterability might be calculated, and the story of the representa-
tional and cultural work that produced it, is the subject of the next chapter.
4 Chinese Bodies, Chinese
Futures
The “Coolie” in Late Nineteenth-Century America
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves
out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it
looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
—Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose: Writings and Poems
1. The Chinese Invasion
We ended chapter 3 with a vision of a box of kidney stones, whose mute witness to
the transpacific exchange that makes possible their appearance on the cover of
this book I took as an allegory for the silence of the archives to which they belong.
The representational play in those stones—like the representational play in the
Lam Qua paintings, which allowed for the remarkable story of their “rediscovery”
by Peter Parker at Guy’s Hospital in London—belongs at least partly to the
distance that separates their current state from their origins. Whatever disgust
or sympathy they generate decays, like the half-life of some strange animal
isotope, with the passage of time and space, so that they can come safely and
harmlessly to rest in a library basement.
Though they did not know it, the migration of those stones from Canton to
Yale University in mid-century was the material precursor to the far more
complex movement of living beings out of China in the second half of the
135
nineteenth century. Most of these migrants and sojourners ended up in the New
World, working in plantations in Hawai’i or Cuba, in the guano mines of Peru, or
in the mines and on the railroads of the American West, and serving as the
fantasized replacements for the forms of labor lost in Europe’s, and eventually
the United States’, turn away from legalized slavery.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the connection between California,
Asia, and a particular form of human labor began to emerge as a commonplace of
American political and cultural life. As Moon-Ho Jung has remarked, 1848 is
the year in which the word “cooly,” used since the sixteenth century to refer to
Indian and Chinese laborers, moved “from the appendix to the main body of
Noah Webster’s American dictionary,” this at the very moment at which “coolies,”
owing partly to the rise of abolitionism, were becoming “indentured laborers
in high demand across the world, particularly in the tropical colonies of
the Caribbean.”1 When Daniel Webster claimed, in remarks regarding whether
California should join the union as a slave or a free state that immediately
preceded the Compromise of 1850, that slavery was impossible in the American
West because “California and New Mexico are Asiatic, in their formation and
scenery,” the connection he asserted between Asiatic geography and the future of
American labor emblematized far better than he could have known at the time
the dilemmas that would make the coolie such a controversial figure only twenty
years later.2
The national discussion regarding Chinese labor went through a number of
stages over the latter half of the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, pro- and
anti-slavery writers alike condemned the coolie trade, arguing either that it
1
Moon-Ho Jung, “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation,”
American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005), 679. See also Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the
Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, 2006).
2
Daniel Webster, “The Constitution and the Union” (otherwise known as the Seventh of March
Oration) Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, 280–81. Webster’s speech laid much of the
ideological groundwork for the Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter the Union as a free
state, divided the New Mexico territory from Texas, and substantially strengthened laws governing the
capture and return of fugitive slaves. But Webster was by no means the first American to bring the
American landscape, Asia, and the natural forms of labor together in a geographic imaginary. Haun
Saussy, in “The First Chinese Americans (?),” cites a pamphlet encouraging the settlement of Carolina
written by Jean-Pierre Purry in 1733, which claims that “the great article whereby one is sure of prospering
and making a fortune [in Purrysburg], without much work or expenditure, is the planting of a sufficient
quantity of white mulberry trees to raise SILKWORMS: for there is perhaps no country in the world
where these trees grow so well, or where the silk is as beautiful, as in Carolina” (Ex/Change 14 [October
2005]. Also available online at http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ccs/Newsletter/newsletter14/Contribution2.htm).
CHINESE BODIES, CHINESE FUTURES 137
resembled in all its particulars the African slave trade (it included an equally
harrowing middle passage3), or in some cases that it was substantially worse,
and thus it demonstrated the benevolence of the American slave system.4 In 1852,
Chinese laborers embarked for San Francisco aboard the American sailing ship
the Robert Browne mutinied against their American officers and crew, causing
an international diplomatic scandal (mediated in Canton by the U.S. chargé
d’affaires there, none other than Peter Parker) and drawing attention to the
violence and exploitation surrounding the trade in Chinese workers.5 When in
February 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed “An Act to
Prohibit the ‘Coolie Trade’ by American Citizens in American Vessels,” his
fortification of the ideological bona fides of the Northern position on the trade
in human beings also confirmed a national consensus on coolie labor.
That consensus did not last long. Despite widespread portrayals of Chinese
people as animals, pagans, insects, and savages (about which more later) the
prospect of cheap labor was compelling enough to cause the formation of the
3
Coolie” vessels were known as “floating hells”; Robert Schwendinger gives mortality rates of
around 30 percent for two voyages from China to Peru in the early 1850s and cites an estimate that only
a third of Chinese laborers who made it to Peru lived to complete their five-year term of service (Ocean
of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations Between China and the United States, 1850–1915 [Tucson, 1988]
23, 27.). His third and fourth chapters deal extensively with American involvement in the trade in
Chinese workers in the pre–Civil War period.
4
“No inferior race of men can exist in these United States without becoming subordinate to the
will of the Anglo-Americans,” wrote antislavery activist Hinton Helper in 1855, while worrying that
“the copper of the Pacific [would become] as great a subject of discord and dissension as the ebony of
the Atlantic” (cited in Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese
Movement in California [Berkeley, 1995], 19.). And J. D. B. De Bow used the iniquities and violence
perpetrated on Chinese workers to cast a softer light on the American alternative. De Bow, writes
Moon-Ho Jung, considered the new human trade in the Caribbean to demonstrate “the moral
superiority of the U.S. South and the dire consequences of interfering in the racial order. The
‘human conduct’ of American slaveholders, he argued, ‘preserved’ human life and the four million
American slaves deserved to be spared ‘the risk of being exposed to evils’ characteristic of other
plantations societies” (692).
5
When the ship and its Chinese workers were recovered (some workers were killed in the mutiny,
some committed suicide, and others escaped), they were returned to Canton, and Parker arranged for a
court of inquiry to consider the case. Though Parker’s inquiry resulted in seventeen prisoners being sent
to Chinese authorities for trial, the Chinese commissioners found all seventeen not guilty and released
them. Diplomatic missives ensued, with no change to the final situation, and an angry Parker finally
wrote to the commissioners to say that in the future “the United States will execute their own laws in
cases of piracy occurring on the high seas,” warning that if the United States succeeded in capturing any
of the former passengers on the Robert Browne, they would be “tried and punished by the United States
as an example for the future” (Schwendinger, 44). By the late 1850s, however, Parker had become a
major advocate for the abolition of the trade in Chinese workers; see Schwendinger, 56–57.
American Emigrant Company in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1863 in order

to acquire Chinese “miners, mechanics (including workers in iron and
steel of every class), weavers, and agricultural, rail-road and other
laborers . . . in any numbers, and at a reasonable cost.”6 Six years later, Cornelius
Koopmanschap’s offer, made to several hundred delegates at the nation’s
first convention on Chinese labor, “to import thousands of laborers from
China for one hundred dollars a head,” Andrew Gyory writes, “triggered a
chain reaction of interest in importing Chinese workers” including orders for
workers from railroad owners in Tennessee and manufacturers from Ohio and
Missouri.7
For our purposes here the particularity of various American positions on
indentured labor from Asia matter less than the series of connections such
positions generated and reproduced. The alleged character of Asian labor—or
rather, the characterization of a certain form of labor as Asian—sustained the
prosecution of Chinese immigrants throughout the late nineteenth century, and,
as Jung notes, “rationalized U.S. expansion abroad, from China and Cuba in the
1850s to the Philippines in the 1890s.”8 In so doing, the association between
China, labor, and the western United States established a historical legacy for
thinking about the Asiatic racial character that has persisted through the twenti-
eth century and into our own.
I wish therefore to concentrate on the ways that the linked set of associations—
California, Asia or the Asiatic character, and labor—consistently produced a
discourse about the physical body of the Chinese worker and its relation to
physical suffering. This discourse borrowed from “expert” testimony about
China produced by American and British missionaries and was sustained in the
related fields of history and economics by theories of “Oriental despotism” and
the “Asiatic mode of production,” which following their initial articulations on
the continent began to appear in American newspapers in this period.9 The major
field of its expression was the battle against Chinese immigration during the latter
half of the nineteenth century. This battle’s most explicit framework—the threat
of “degraded” labor—was consistently synecdochized in the body of a faceless
6
Cited in Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1998), 19.
7
Gyory, 31, 33–34.
8
Jung, “Outlawing ‘Coolies,’” 698.
9
Karl Marx, for instance, published a series of articles on the Asiatic Mode of Production in the
New York Daily Tribune in 1853, as Perry Anderson notes in his survey of the history of the idea
(Lineages of the Absolutist State [London, 1974], 475.).
Chinese worker whose physical body, understood as an outgrowth of his racial

and cultural heritage, became the implacable source of the threat he posed to the
American worker (and indeed, to the United States in general). Figured as
enduring, impervious to physical pain, and mechanical or slavish in its relation
to freedom, pleasure, and a volitional relation to history, this body spoke to
Americans—or rather, was spoken, ventriloquistically, by them—most insistently
of the possibility of a future that promised to rewrite the relationship between
suffering and human being.
2. The Machine Body
A 1902 American Federation of Labor (AFL) pamphlet designed to encourage the

permanent extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act—whose passage in 1882 had
radically restricted immigration from China, and inaugurated an era of race-
based immigration policy that persisted in law until the mid-1960s—opens with a
review of the Chinese worker’s place in California history. Acknowledging the
presence of Chinese laborers in the state when it was “more or less a great mining
camp” and they caused “no alarm or discomfort” to white America, the pamphlet
nonetheless argues that “pro-Chinese sentimentalists” who suggest that “without
Chinese labor the Pacific States would not have advanced as rapidly as they have
done” need to rethink that claim in light of a reply by a “well-known California
physician”: “advancement with an incubus like the Chinese is like the growth of a
child with a malignant tumor upon his back. At the time of manhood death
comes of the malignity.”10 The comparison of the Chinese to an incubus captures
the combination of sexuality without reproduction and effort without progress
that the Asiatic stereotype represented in 1902. That the Chinese were parasites on
the social body of the nation, stunting its natural growth, stripping it of nutrients,
and providing no benefits in return, was the subject of countless complaints.
Twenty years earlier, James Whitney had written that presence of Chinese workers
shut California off “from the legitimate elements of growth which would have
made her, in all the essentials of material and moral prosperity, tenfold stronger
than she is to-day. Chinese labor has operated not only to prevent, but to destroy,
the normal development of the State, and to thrown [sic] upon the people
10
Samuel Gompers, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat Versus Rice: American Manhood
Against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? (Washington, D.C., 1902), 5. Further references are
cited in this text as AFL.
unwonted burdens.”11 The AFL’s nameless physician drew on this same the
framework of growth, parasitism, and development to declare the Chinese a
cancer.
The AFL pamphlet concatenates almost perfectly a longer history of
representations in which major shifts in the industrial landscape and class
relations were displaced, metonymically, onto Chinese immigration in general,
which in turn was represented by a series of anonymous Chinese bodies portrayed
as ideally suited to new, slavish forms of labor. This was partly an effect of the
different kinds of work done by white and Chinese workers, as the latter were
excluded from skilled labor by organizations of craftsmen attempting to protect
their economic status.12 But the effect of that difference was to tie Chinese
workers ever closer to the idea of a proletarianized future, so that larger, ungrasp-
able processes of capitalist development were given a coherent and easily under-
stood form in the synecdoche of “the Chinese coolie,” a figure which in turn
became a metaphor for all Chinese people and indeed for Asian history in
general.13 Like an incubus or, indeed, a tumor, the “coolie” was understood as
a life-form whose parasitical existence depended on the gradual hollowing out
of the host that sustained it.14 The problem was not that the Chinese did not
“generate,” but rather that their labor produced a growth inimical to the health of
the country as a whole, largely because it rerouted the flow of capital around the
European worker.
By working for cheaper than the white man would (or could—as we shall see),
the “coolie” also came to signify the “increasing transnationalization of labor
markets,” Colleen Lye writes, representing both the “biological impossibility” and
the “numerical abstraction” that was at the heart of industrial labor: the Chinese
11
James Whitney, The Chinese and the Chinese Question (New York, 1888), 116.
12
White workers who competed directly with the Chinese, Alexander Saxton writes, “were for
the most part those who were no longer capable (if they ever had been) of bidding for jobs against
skilled white tradesmen” (264).
13
On this topic, see Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia,
1999).
14
Parker, cutting into his Chinese patients’ bodies, had marveled at the complexity and size of
the vascular systems their tumors built to sustain themselves. Though the AFL’s desire to excise the
Chinese tumor on California’s body resembles in many ways the more literal project taken up by
Parker’s hospital work, the difference in the nationalities of the afflicted suggest that the force of the
tumors in Parker’s paintings did indeed bleed over into the idea of China they portrayed. As though
the mere fact of having enormous tumors were enough to suggest, also, that China or the Chinese were
like them—a metonymic effect Larissa Heinrich and Sander Gilman both ascribe to the Lam Qua
portraits.
“coolie” was a person, but also a machine.15 It was this latter quality that allowed
the “coolie” to metaphorize both the process of industrial production and its
product, as though the numberless faceless and identical Chinese workers had
simply been stamped out on a production line like so many millions of pins.
If the coolie’s body seemed naturally suited to the rigors of industrialization,
then, it was because it was itself the imaginary product of an industrial process,
and because it was a product produced—or so it seemed—to work in the kind of
factory that produced it. It would be hard to underestimate the obsessive insis-
tence with which this fact was apprehended and narrated as a biological feature of
the Chinese worker, most neatly summarized as an ability to endure low levels of
constant pain. The coolie’s “endurance” was endlessly repeated, explained, and
raged against in the nineteenth century literature, where it was consistently
understood as the racial substructure that enabled the Chinese worker to accept
wages far lower than his Irish or German counterparts. “You cannot work a man
who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beef, alongside of a man who
can live on rice,” James G. Blaine told the U.S. Senate in 1879. “In all such
conflicts, and in all such struggles, the result is not to bring up the man who
lives on rice to the beef-and-bread standard, but it is to bring down the beef-and-
bread man to the rice standard.” Cited on the last page of the same AFL pamphlet
that began by comparing the Chinese to a tumor, this sentence generated the
document’s nutritionally focused title, “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat
versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?,”
even as it gave Feuerbach’s gastronomic thesis, “Der Mensch ist, was er ißt” (“Man
is what he eats”), first published in 1850, an unexpectedly racial form.16
More broadly, the coolie’s ability to endure small levels of pain or consume
only the meagerest food and lodging represented an almost inhuman adaptation
to contemporary forms of modern work. “As concerns ability for labor,” wrote
James Whitney, “they are generally considered as possessed of a great endurance
rather than of great bodily strength. It was calculated that, of those employed in
15
Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.,
2005), 57.
16
The phrase appeared in a review of the chemist Jakob Moleschott’s Lehre der Nahrungsmittel.
A portion of Feuerbach’s review that suggests that the differentiation between meat and rice, manhood
and slavery was already a part of mid-century thinking about nutrition: “A man who enjoys only a
vegetable diet is a vegetating being, is incapable of action” (cited in Melvin Cherno, “Feuerbach’s ‘Man
Is What He Eats’: A Rectification,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 3 [1963], 401.). The Chinese
preference for rice appears, in this context, easily assimilable to a sense of the Chinese as frozen in
history, or as willing slaves, in contrast to revolutionary, self-defending, progressive Europeans.
the construction of the Pacific Railway, it required five Chinese laborers to do the
work of four of those of our own country.”17 Likewise Henry George, in the New
York Tribune in 1869: “They take less earth at a spadeful than an Irishman. But in a
day’s work take up more spadefuls.”18 It is George’s second sentence that reveals
the threat endurance posed to European labor. In a new economy defined by mass
production, individual strength was giving way to the ability to suffer light
burdens repetitively. “It should be kept in mind that . . . the value of physical
strength, pure and simple, has been diminishing for more than two hundred
years,” Whitney wrote. “What gunpowder and arms of precision have done to
degrade the value of physical prowess in war, improvements in implements and
machinery have done to debase the value of physical strength in the arts and
industries, and the Chinaman is equal to all the demands, whether of peace or
war, of civilized or barbaric existence” (64).19 Hence the image on the frontispiece
of the AFL’s pamphlet in 1902, “The American Gulliver and the Chinese Lillipu-
tians” (figure 4.1 below), which shows a white laborer pinned to the ground by
banners reading “cheap labor,” “heathen competition,” and “starvation wages” as
an endless stream of tiny Chinese workers flows toward and over him. The
threatened triumph of the coolie promised a victory of quantity over quality, of
consistent small efforts over heroic large ones, of the faceless horde over the
individual, and of mass production over unalienated, organic labor. This is why
the Chinese are so often compared to insects, and why “the white laborer who
would compete with them . . . must, like them, abdicate his individuality.”20
17
Whitney, The Chinese Question, 64.
18
Cited in H. J. West, The Chinese Invasion; Revealing the Habits, Manners, and Customs of the
Chinese, Political, Social and Religious, on the Pacific Coast, Coming in contact with the free and
enlightened citizens of America . . . containing careful selections from The San Francisco Press (San
Francisco, 1873), 28.
19
As for Henry George, he continued: “The tendency of modern production is to a greater and
greater subdivision of labor—to confine the operative to one part of the process, and to require of him
close attention and manual dexterity, rather than knowledge, judgment, and skill. It is in this qualities
that the Chinese excel” (West, 28).
20
AFL, 19. On insects: “Silent and persistent as the white ants that destroy the strongest timbers
while the householder sleeps, they go further and further” (Whitney, Chinese Question, 137); Rudyard
Kipling, cited in the AFL pamphlet: “There are three races who can work, but there is only one that can
swarm” (10). The AFL pamphlet also refers to a “hive of 450,000,000 Chinese,” and Arthur Smith in his
notorious Chinese Characteristics discusses “the enormous aggregation of the population in huge
hives” (17) (Arthur Smith, Chinese Characteristics [Norwalk, Conn., 2003], 187 [further references are
cited in this text as CC]). The Rev. E. Trumbull Lee was one of many to refer to the Chinese as
“locusts”; see Rev. E. Trumbull Lee, “Anti-Chinese: Coolie Question Discussed by a Portland Pastor,”
Fig 4.1 “The American Gulliver and the Chinese Lilliputians.” Frontispiece of Some
Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat Versus Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic
Coolieism. Which Shall Survive? (1901). Courtesy of The Huntington Library.
At home, the Chinese also undermined the American future by refusing to

consume like Americans. More than simply an ability to live in conditions impossi-
ble for white workers, Chinese nonconsumption was conceived as an active refusal
to return wages to the American economy that made them possible. The AFL report
again: “The home market should grow with the population. But the Chinese, living
on the most meager food, having no families to support, inured to deprivation, and
hoarding their wages for use in their native land, whither they invariably return,
cannot in any sense be regarded as consumers. Their earnings do not circulate
[another vascular metaphor], nor are they reinvested—contrary to those economic
laws which make the for the prosperity of nations.”21 The Chinese simply “do not,
will not, and cannot take up the burdens of American citizenship” (AFL, 35).
originally in Portland Daily News, February 13, 1886; also available online at http://www.ohs.org/
education/focus_on_oregon_history/APH-Document-Lee-Article-1886.cfm.
21
This case was made with special force in the AFL pamphlet because its anti-Chinese position
competed with the pro-Chinese, pro-business arguments that saw the generous treatment of Chinese
immigrants as a way of helping U.S. companies gain traction in overseas Chinese markets. John Eperjesi
has shown how the American Asiatic Association, founded in 1898, used its journal to spread the idea that
The movement between “will not” and “cannot” in that last sentence indicates
the degree to which the alleged behavior of Chinese immigrants, which tended to
begin from voluntarist arguments, tended to end with biological ones. An
“absence of nerves,” remarkable “staying qualities,” and a “capacity to wait
without complaint and to bear with calm endurance,” were all features of Chinese
people in general described by the American missionary Arthur Smith in his 1894
Chinese Characteristics, the most widely read American work on China in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 “If he is a handicraftsman he will
stand in one place from dewy morn till dusky eve,” Smith wrote, “and do it every
day without any variation in the monotony, and apparently with no special
consciousness that there is any monotony to be varied” (CC, 92). The phrase
“no special consciousness” brings together, in a manner typical of the new
sociological thinking of this period, the voluntarist and biological aspects of
social life. Rather than suggest that the Chinese worker feels monotony like the
American, but simply deals with it better, Smith imagines that the Chinese worker
does not experience monotony or repetition in the first place. Framed as a lack of
consciousness of what to Smith must have seemed a well-nigh objective state of
affairs, the Chinese difference—if difference, of course, there was—came to rest
on a theory of culture that imagined the body as the natural outgrowth of a set of
circumstances that shaped the parameters of will, of suffering, and even of
sensory awareness.
That such a difference expressed itself in the apparently objective idiom of the
human body reminds us that the body is always also a phenomenological lens.
The scale of our experience is objectively and subjectively anthropomorphic,
“the future of this Republic is bound up with its prestige on the Pacific Ocean” and dreamed of the
economic plenitude that would follow the sale of widgets to millions of widgetless Chinese. Eperjesi
ultimately sees in the association’s work an attempt to “stabilize a terrain of [economic] crisis by giving
capital a clear vision of the future. The idea that the China market provided the solution to crisis,” he
writes, “was nowhere given in advance by the needs of capital” (“The American Asiatic Association and
the Imperialist Imaginary of the American Pacific,” boundary 2 28:1 [2001], 218.). See also Eperjesi, The
Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (Lebanon, N.H., 2004). For a
discussion of the ways in which this racialized take on labor circulated in relation to the development of
models of the ideal consumer in early twentieth-century United States culture, see chapter three of Grace
Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of
Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis, 2006).
22
Lydia Liu writes in her introduction to Smith that his book was only replaced as an authority
on China by Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), and cites a 1925 survey that ranks Chinese
Characteristics first on a list of the most important Western works on China. Among its many
translations were several in Chinese and Japanese, which Liu discusses at length in Translingual
Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, 1995).
objectively in the sense that we cannot grasp or make meaning otherwise than
through bodies, and subjectively because in each case the body through which
meanings are grasped or made is so particular: we all speak from a body (one of
many), but also from the specific physical being of our body (unlike, we feel,
anyone else’s). What Smith’s racism required, and what indeed was being recog-
nized in the new sociology and anthropology of the turn of the century, was a
theory in which the phenomenological apparatus of any given body, far from
being either universal (the same for everyone) or individual (and totally relative),
was the dictate of a cultural or racial system that preceded it.23 Such an ontology
of the body would suggest, as did Smith, that the realities of everyday experience
were in fact secondary to some other (racial, cultural) feature of existence
through which undifferentiated human bodies came to be Chinese, Irish, Ger-
man, Italian, or African, and, with only a few exceptions, stayed that way for life.
For Smith (as for the AFL pamphlet), then, the body was the field upon which
cultural difference exercised its power, the raw material whose form expressed
most nakedly the racial logic or cultural identity that determined its relation to
pain, monotony, labor, nutrition, consumption, pleasure, and morality. If, as
Smith argued, “we must take account of the fact that in China breathing seems to
be optional,” it was not only because doing so allowed us to determine our proper
relation to the Chinese, but because the Chinese person’s optional breathing was
also the expression of the nature of the Chinese body, which in turn told us
something about the nature of the Chinese race and Chinese culture (94). Once
established, of course, the indisputable fact of this Chinese nature sustained an
endless series of conclusions that reinforced the stereotype, which is why the
claims about Chinese bodies appear so repetitively throughout anti-Chinese
discourse (without for all that becoming too “monotonous”). The AFL pamphlet,
for instance, includes a statistical table demonstrating the Chinese disregard of
San Francisco’s “Cubic Air Ordinance.” Enter a Chinatown dwelling, the accom-
panying text suggests, and you will find persons who had they not been disturbed
“would have slept in the dense and poisonous atmosphere until morning, proof
against the baneful effects of the carbonic-acid gas generated by human defiance
of chemical laws and proof against all the zymotic poisons that would be fatal to a
people of any other race in an hour of such surroundings” (AFL, 22).24 Framed by
the logic of his impossibility, the Chinese worker’s failure to consume reveals itself
23
On the relation between the postwar sociology of the Chicago School and Asian America, see
Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2002).
24
The pamphlet is citing the “Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of the
City and County of San Francisco, appointed to investigate and report upon Chinatown, July 1885.”
not as an act of unpleasant privation undertaken by someone too poor to rent a

bigger place or buy beef stew, but as the natural outgrowth of the biological cage
that hosts him. The Chinese subject could no more awaken to his own privation
or boredom than an animal could to human language.25
In framing Chinese exclusion as a choice between “American manhood” and
“Asiatic coolieism,” the AFL pamphlet voiced a common concern among anti-
Chinese activists: that the gradual replacement of workers of European descent by
Chinese ones would result in the “Chinafication” of American life. The final fear was
that we (Americans) would all become coolies. Though writer after writer was
willing to insist that at the individual level such a transformation was improba-
ble—that, as Blaine suggested, you simply can’t feed a man on rice if he needs beef—
the battle against Chinese exclusion was nonetheless understood as a more general
battle against modernization itself, and indeed against the new forms of human
consciousness demanded by the age. Hence Smith: “To the Anglo-Saxon race, at
least, it seems a matter of course that those who live in an age of steam and of
electricity must necessarily be in a different condition, as to their nerves, from those
who lived in the old slow days of sailing-packets and of mail-coaches. Ours is an age
of extreme activity. It is an age of rush . . . The effect of overworking our nerves
shows itself not mainly in such affectations as ‘fiddler’s cramp,’ ‘telegrapher’s cramp,’
‘writer’s cramp,’ and the like, but in a general tension” (CC, 90–91). Though Smith
wants to dissociate the “general tension” of a nervous modernity from the job-
specific illnesses he refers to, it is nonetheless telling that each of these “cramps” is a
repetitive stress injury caused by the replication of small, individually insignificant
gestures, as though the general tension of the times were the result not of any single,
25
Reading Smith from the perspective of Martin Heidegger’s meditation on boredom reveals the
importance of the Chinese ability to endure monotony. For Heidegger, “Dasein is simply an animal
that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation [by the world] to its own
captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute
opening to the not-open, is the human” (cited in Giogio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans.
Kevin Attell [Stanford, 2004], 70.). Being human is to have the capacity to be bored; hence the Chinese
acceptance of the monotonous puts them on the other side of the dividing line, with the animals. It is
for these reasons that anti-Chinese activists often insisted—echoing the hopes of the manufacturers
entranced by Koopmanschap’s proposals to import Chinese workers—that the Chinese could not be
trusted to unionize, that they lacked the fellow-feeling and political will necessary to strike. Such
claims were nonsense, as Chinese workers struck on a number of occasions, both on their own and as
part of “mainstream” strikes. See Gyory for a description of the cigar makers’ strike of 1877; he cites the
Labor Standard which remarks that “in joining the strike, the Chinese ‘showed themselves capable of
real civilization” (98). The notion that Asian workers, because of Confucianism, are generally more
pliable than European ones persists to this day; see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society,
2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000), 193.
significant event or crisis but of the daily, unceasing, worrisome, and morbid
reiterations of the new modern life—itself simply an allegory of work on the
industrial production line. Only a page later, Smith marvels at the Chinese worker’s
ability to “write all day like an automaton” (CC, 92).
So it was that the Chinese body could figure the West’s potentially “Chinese”
future, as though somewhere in the particular embodied qualities of the Chinese—
which included, as Yellow Perilist discourse made clear throughout the period, the
fact of their sheer number—lay the obscured and secret fulcrum of the future to
come. Angle the lever one way, and you got the return to mass slavery and oligarchic
despotism presaged by Chinese labor in the United States. Push the burden from the
other side, as optimists and missionaries dreamed, and it was the Chinese who
would be transformed, ushering in an age of universal Christian sympathy.
This latter, much-desired shift would not come easily, Smith thought. The
“character and conscience” that had taken the West a thousand years to develop
could not just “be suddenly taken up by the Chinese for their own, and set in
operation, like a Krupp gun from Essen, mounted and ready to be discharged”
(CC, 329). This separation of character (painstakingly built up) and the mass-
produced good (the prêt-à-tirer) reinforced the very division that separated his
individualized Westerners from his undifferentiated Chinese, labor defined by
individuated strength and willpower from its slavish, mechanical, imitative
Oriental counterpart. The terms of Smith’s withholding indicate how dearly the
West aimed to sell the final proof of civilization abroad.
Though the comparison between culture and the Krupp gun distinguishes the
former’s artisanal mode from the latter’s mass production, the fact that the latter is
also a weapon recalls Whitney’s anxieties about what “gunpowder and arms of
precision have done to degrade the value of physical prowess in war,” degrade being
the privileged term for describing what Chinese labor would do to white labor in the
United States. The military framing of these two metaphors hint at an underlying
anxiety that Whitney, at least, was willing to make explicit: “China is stronger on the
Pacific Coast in men capable of bearing arms than ourselves, and . . . she can
transport ten warriors from the middle of the kingdom to San Francisco at less
expense than the United States can convey a single soldier and his knapsack from
Chicago to the Coast; . . . she can send vessels with stronger armor and heavier guns
to breach the walls of Alcatraz than we could provide for defense, and could send
them in a shorter time.”26 Whitney thus clarifies the stakes of “the Chinese question”
26
Whitney, 195.
by literalizing the threat of a Chinese future in martial terms. It would be foolish to

say that this military angle—present also, though less directly, in Smith’s compari-
son between culture and a Krupp gun27—reveals the final truth about anti-Chinese
agitation on America’s West Coast, which would then turn out to have been about
national warmongering all along. But it makes sense to understand the articulation,
however metaphorical, of a Chinese military threat as yet another dimension of
larger concerns about the Chinese “invasion” of the United States through immi-
gration and the generally “Asiatic” quality of the Western landscape, that is, as
expressions of anxiety about European sovereignty over the American territory, and,
more pressingly, about the sovereignty of an idealized, monocultural, and artisanal
past over a multiracial, mass-produced future embedded in both the body of the
Chinese worker and the very landscape of the nation.
3. That Dystopian Feeling
It should not therefore surprise anyone that a good number of late nineteenth-
century Americans took it upon themselves to write stories that imagined the
invasion of the United States by an army of the Chinese. Such stories tended to be
organized around the prospect of a horde of numberless, faceless Chinese pour-
ing over American borders and bludgeoning a valiant nation into submission by
degrees: more or less the plot of Pierton W. Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic
(1880), Robert Woltor’s A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of Oregon and
California by the Chinese in the Year a.d. 1899 (1882), and a number of short
stories published in the Overland Monthly. Borrowing from the larger cultural
discourse that imagined the coolie as marked by a capacity for enduring the
suffering of either boredom or physical pain, these stories featured Chinese
armies indifferent to their own casualties and characterized by, as Woltor put it,
27
Lest these metaphors be understood simply as metaphors, however, let us return to the vehicle
of their meaning. Following the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in China in 1851, China became a
ready customer for Western military equipment. The successes of the “Ever-Victorious Army,” led by
foreign officers including Charles “Chinese” Gordon, prompted such enthusiasm for Western weap-
onry, Joanna Waley-Cohen writes, that they “converted Li Hongzhang, the man who was to play a
leading role in Chinese politics and international affairs from the late 1860s until his death in 1901, to
active enthusiasm for foreign firepower and its technology . . . Under Li’s auspices China became such
a good client of Krupp, the German weapons manufacturer, that Alfred Krupp hung a picture of Li over
above his bed.” (The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York, 1999), 184–85;
emphasis mine). In 1896, Li toured the United States, where, among other things, he encouraged
Congress to relax immigration restrictions on Chinese workers.
“a stoic indifference to pain, which makes them fearless to deeds of blood, and a
certain coolness in moments of excitement and danger, when calmness is invalu-
able.”28 These stories leavened American defeat with tales of Chinese cowardice,
cruelty, and poor character, pitting the venality of the invaders against an
American populace too trusting of foreigners, which they punctuated here and
there with a doomed, authentic hero whose efforts clarified the need for a breed
of American ideologically and militarily equipped to resist future foreign inva-
sion. Successful books in this genre thus reinscribed the logic of individual, craft
labor in the body of their heroic protagonists, clarifying once again the value of
manual labor over factory work, manhood over coolieism, and—looking ahead
to another military conflict between Asia and the West—Rambos over Rimbauds.
The rest of this chapter examines a book which, though it belonged to the
genre, did none of those things, a book that was by most common measures of
literary success an abject failure. The reading I pursue does not redeem the book,
nor does it find in its collocation of character and event some perfect mirror of its
time, or the secret key to the ideological apparatus of its era. It reads it, instead,
within the relatively banal framework of its failure—because even its failures are in
no way spectacular or impressive. And it finds there an opening onto possibility, a
tangential take on the historical framework within which the nineteenth century
thought the “Chinese problem,” that was, if nothing else, a possibility inherent in
the social. Whether such a possibility constituted a minority opinion in the society
of its time, or whether in fact the novel or its author intended in any way to
communicate the relationship to China, to sympathy, and to the future of moder-
nity that I will argue that it does communicate, makes little difference here. What
matters is that the novel—Arthur Vinton’s 1890 Looking Further Backward—
imagined, bravely or unknowingly, a form of sympathetic and material exchange
in which the entire problematic with which we have been concerned so far resolves
itself, not without significant violence, into an open and actionable future for the
citizens of both the United States and China. In this future the forms of material
exchange presaged by the rise of transnational markets for factory labor and the
rise of industrial production are resolved not through Chinese exclusion—as the
United States government did in its anti-immigration act of 1882—but through
their inclusion in a new transpacific polity.
28
Robert Woltor, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the
Chinese in the Year a.d. 1899 (San Francisco, 1882), 77; Pierton W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic
(San Francisco, 1880). William F. Wu discusses these novels, as well as the Overland Monthly short
stories, in The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction 1850–1940 (Hamden, Conn., 1982).
What were the more successful models of anti-Chinese fiction from which
Vinton’s Looking Further Backward could have borrowed? Certainly the market
for paranoid invasion science fiction was robust in the 1890s: Ignatius Donnelly’s
Caesar’s Column, published a year after Looking Further Backward and featuring a
successful American worker’s revolt (set in 1988) against an Orientalized, cosmo-
politan oligarchy, sold 60,000 copies in its first year alone (and appeared in
German translation three years later).29 And M.P. Shiel’s short stories, collected
in 1898’s The Yellow Danger, were reissued in the United States following their
success in Britain, their readers thrilling to tales of hand-to-hand combat and
violent torture.30 Whatever pride of place Looking Further Backward has in the
29
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1960). The
book was originally published in Chicago, a factor which may be partially explained by (or help to
explain) its far more transnational outlook—though the oligarchy is “Asiatic” in form, the novel’s
enemy is a generalized world culture that derives not from military invasion but from the progress of
monopoly capitalism. For more on Donnelly, see Lye, 63–72, and Saxton, 283–84. It was not until the
early twentieth century that English-language writers began to worry explicitly about a military
invasion coming from Japan, presumably for reasons having largely to do with the changing positions
of the two major East Asian nations, codified most clearly in the Japanese victory against Russia (1905)
and the fall of the Chinese Qing regime in 1911. A united Asian front including Japan, China, and India
attacks the West is in H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air (1907); Richard Thompson discusses a series of
articles written by U.S. Congressman Richmond P. Hobson (in Cosmopolitan magazine!) under the
title “If War Should Come,” which was “the most detailed prognostication of the course of a Japanese-
American war that had been offered up to that time” (The Yellow Peril, 1890-1924,” Ph.D. diss., U. of
Wisconsin, 1957, 427–34 passim). Or, consider Marsden Manson’s The Yellow Peril in Action: A Possible
Chapter in History (San Francisco, 1907), in which the combined might of the Chinese army and the
Japanese navy erases the United States’ presence in the Pacific and demands, as part of the peace treaty,
that the U.S. Constitution be amended to grant aliens equal rights of citizenship. Like Hobson’s articles
in Cosmopolitan, Manson’s fictional account of the war (which he set in 1910) aimed at least partially to
educate Americans in the commercial and military value of the Pacific Ocean and the United States’
presence there (in Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, and the West Coast ports). To that end, it included a
fold-out map illustrating the United States’ “masterly position” between the world’s three great oceans
(18). Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” which appeared in The Strength of the Strong (New
York, 1914), imagines a China modernized with Japanese help taking over the world through sheer
demographics until its population is annihilated by a race-anxious Western coalition using germ
warfare.
30
M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger (London, 1888); republished in the United States and England
with an additional subtitle as The Yellow Danger: Or, What Might Happen if the Division of the Chinese
Empire Should Estrange All European Countries (London and New York, 1899). I am grateful to R. John
Williams for drawing this novel to my attention. Williams’s dissertation brilliantly connects several
Chinese invasion novels of this era to the later ties, in the modernist work of Ezra Pound, between
technology and China. For longer discussions of fantasy and science fiction featuring the Chinese,
particular the notorious villains Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless, see William F. Wu, Sheng-Mei
Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis, 2000) and Robert
G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, 1999); on Chinese invasion science
pantheon of paranoid, anti-Chinese American science fiction must lie, therefore,

in the fact that it neither followed the models that preceded, nor inspired the
works that followed it, in the fact, that is, that its imagination of the future was so
uncompelling as to allow it—along with Vinton’s literary career more generally—
to disappear without leaving much of a mark on even that small subsection of
American literary history to which it belongs.
Vinton’s failure to pick up on the stock formulae of anti-Chinese science fiction
may be at least partially explained by his location within the United States. Unlike
Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic or Woltor’s A Short and Truthful History of the
Taking of Oregon and California, both of which were published in San Francisco
and surely found there a white reading audience well acquainted with the coolie
stereotype and attuned to anxieties about Chinese labor, Vinton’s novel was
published in Albany, New York, presumably by virtue of Vinton’s many connec-
tions in that state, where he worked as a lawyer and, after retiring in 1884, became
the assistant editor of the North American Review. The Northeast was not
immune to the pressures of Chinese labor—an attempt to bring seventy-five
Chinese workers to break a strike at a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts,
in 1870 produced an outcry that spread across the Northeast and Midwest, a mass
meeting involving three to four thousand people, and widespread coverage in local
newspapers.31 But the issues most pressing to the writers of classically anti-
Chinese science fiction in California did not weigh as heavily there.
Most crucially, however, the intellectual and social context in which Vinton’s
book appeared, and to which his novel directly responds, involved the politico-
economic furor instigated by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, Looking
Backward, 2000–1887. In the years after its publication, Looking Backward, “the
single most influential narrative utopia of the nineteenth century” and the third-
best-selling American fiction of its age (behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur)
inspired political movements, socialist salons, and ambitious revolutionaries
throughout the United States and Europe and prompted widespread public
discussion about disparities in wealth and living conditions, which were felt by
so many to be on the verge of destroying the dream of the Republic.32
fiction of the 1990s, see Eric Hayot, “Chineseness: A Prehistory of Its Future,” in Sinographies: Writing
China, eds. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao (Minneapolis, 2007).
31
For more on the North Adams strike, see Gyory, Closing the Gate, chapter 3 and Robert Lee,
Orientals 55–56.
32
Philip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of
Modernity (Berkeley, 2002), 62.
The novel tells the story of Julian West, a Bostonian who falls into a deep
hypnotic sleep in 1888, and wakes up 112 years later to a new world. In the Boston
of the year 2000, the entire population has been united under the banner of an
economic and political system called “Nationalism,” and the American Gilded
Age is no more than a historical nightmare from which the residents of the new
twenty-first century are delighted to have awoken. Nationalism, West discovers in
a series of conversations with Dr. Leete, the man in whose basement he comes to,
is a social system organized around the full state regulation of the economy and a
general devotion to the common good. Under Nationalism, all citizens enjoy
equal access to the fruits of their collective labor, drawing on communal stores
and dining halls and benefiting from a credit system designed to deter hoarding
and profligacy.33 Each person works in a job best suited to his or her particular set
of interests and skills, and the nation as a whole is governed by a committee of
people whose election comes as a result of their success in the workforce.
What’s more, the wealth produced by such a system allows all of Nationalism’s
subjects to live as well as the wealthiest members of West’s nineteenth-century
Boston.34
Vinton’s Looking Further Backward was just one of several novels and pamph-
lets to piggyback on the ideological ferment created by Bellamy’s bold vision of a
United States—and indeed a planet—unburdened by the class divisions and
exploitations of the Gilded Age. Such fictions took part in the late-century
struggle to represent (and control) the American future of industrial capitalism
and the kind of labor it required, particularly as it affected the relation between
individual work and concepts of production and consumption. Bellamy’s success,
as well as the parodies and responses that followed, indicate the degree to which
this struggle mattered to the public culture of its time.
33
Women were considered an “allied” rather than co-equal force with men in Bellamy’s utopian
future, though the very fact of their inclusion in the structure of the national political economy was
enough to draw praise from some contemporary feminists. For a revisionary critique of what she calls
Bellamy’s “vaunted feminism,” see Sylvia Strauss, “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia,” in Daphne
Patai, ed., Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy (Amherst, 1988).
34
Tacked on to all the discussion of Nationalism is a fairly improbable love story, which serves as
the novel’s plot. In it, Julian West ends up marrying Leete’s daughter, who in an astonishing
coincidence turns out to be the granddaughter of Julian’s 1887 fiancée. This logic of amorous
substitution provides, as Jonathan Auerbach has noted, an affective validation of “Bellamy’s entire
project of systematically yet invisibly bureaucratizing traditional ideologies of nationhood” (“‘The
Nation Organized’: Utopian Impotence in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.” American Literary
History 6.1 [Spring 1994], 37.).
Set in 2023, twenty-three years after West’s miraculous awakening, Vinton’s

novel presents the total collapse of the Bellamy’s American utopia. In his preface,
Vinton declares his admiration for Bellamy’s elucidation of the social problems of
the late 1880s, but goes on to say that Looking Further Backward will “point out
wherein the Bellamy Nationalism would prove disastrously weak”: on the subject
of national defense (6). The results of that weakness appear from the novel’s title
page, which declares that is merely the transcript of lectures given to the freshman
class at Boston’s Shawmut College—the very place where Julian West had, in
Bellamy’s novel, wound up as a professor of history—by a Chinese man, Won
Lung Li. Over the course of these lectures, Li lays out for his students the events of
the preceding twenty-three years: the United States’ fall into ideological compla-
cency and self-satisfaction, its failure to police its borders against “emigrants from
the slums of other nations,” and, most of all, its willingness “to abandon every
thing”—everything, that is, that made the nation great—“for the sake of an
idea.”35 In 2020, a Chinese nation threatened by the worldwide spread of Nation-
alism, and strong enough to fight back, invades the United States. By the time Li
delivers his lectures, the Chinese army controls 70 percent of U.S. territory,
leaving only the Upper Midwest in the hands of resistance fighters led by West’s
son Leete. West himself has been killed in action, and Li leavens his lectures with
frequent excerpts from the former’s diaries, which allow him to recount recent
history from a nineteenth century, pre-Nationalist point of view with which
he himself is forcefully aligned.
Scholarship has largely read Vinton’s novel as a work of American dystopian
literature, or as one of several responses to Bellamy, and has paid little attention
to the Chinese context (other than to remark, as Jean Pfaelzer does, the genre’s
predictable alignment with nativist racism).36 The book becomes more interest-
ing in that context, because the very idea of imagining the future as “Chinese”
literalizes so compellingly the economic concerns articulated in the anti-Chinese
immigration debates and, in fact, turns them into aspects of literary form.
In other words, what we have here is Marxist Literary Criticism 101: in a culture
35
Arthur Vinton, Looking Further Backward, Being a Series of Lectures Delivered to the Freshman
Class at Shawmut College, by Professor Won Lung Li (Albany, N.Y., 1890), 31. Further references are cited
in the text as LFB.
36
Williams is the only scholar I know who thinks of Vinton in an Asian American context.
Wegner discusses Vinton as a respondent to Bellamy, and Jean Pfaelzer locates him in an American
dystopian tradition, though neither addresses the novel for more than a couple pages (Pfaelzer,
“Parody and Satire in American Dystopian Fiction of the Nineteenth Century” Science-Fiction Studies
7.1 [March 1980]).
in which China’s status as a threat to national and economic integrity and indeed
to the possibility of an American future is routinely discussed in terms of an
“invasion,” we get a novel whose major formal feature is a relation to the future,
in which an actual Chinese invasion poses a threat to American national and
economic integrity. Beginning with this gives us a major guide on how to read
Looking Further Backward, whose most significant events operate largely at formal
levels and whose imagination of its own future—the future, that is, of the novel’s
present—comes up against a profound mimetic impasse: although the novel
does a very good job of imagining the future until 2023, it can only gesture, and
then only vaguely, at the future beyond it.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Before coming to the ways in which Looking
Further Backward moves past the anthropomorphic bottleneck created by anti-
Chinese discourse of the late 1800s, let us at least look at the novel. It is
characterized, as a novel, by a very strong tendency toward paralepsis, that is,
toward the production in one formal arena of the overall narrative of the
“solution” or resolution proper to a problem created in another formal space.
This tendency appears most clearly in three places: first, in the novel’s many
reversals of the Asiatic stereotype, which consistently displace and defamiliarize
contemporary cultural formations by shifting their national origin or moral
value, retaining the stereotype’s terms but inverting its logic; second, in the fact
that the novel generates the characterological progress of its protagonist—Won
Lung Li—exclusively in narratorial terms, so that the movement between two
types of storytelling becomes the only site in which Li can be said to develop any
“character” at all. Third, the novel’s startling resolution of major political ques-
tions occurs inside the field of grammar, so that the entire problematic of civic
and political life gets resolved not in the diegetic arena (through something like a
description of the new Chinese-Americans responding happily to their situation),
but rather by a pronominal switch whose field of reference reaches beyond the
diegesis. Together these three reversals constitute the novel’s total structure of
feeling, the framework within which the novel does the work of all science
fictions: imagining futurity as an effect of the present.
First, then, the stereotype: the novel’s Chinese are “men of high breeding and
great intellectual attainments,” West writes in his diary, whose “polished manners
and skill in conversation . . . would have made them charming hosts, under
different circumstances” (144). And they have “tender and sympathetic hearts,”
Li tells his students, shedding “many tears over the suffering of the captive
nation” (176). By contrast, the Americans are mechanical, robotic, and sheep-
like. Li speaks of a general “loss of individualism” (28), and writes that “under
Nationalism men had become mere routinists” (93). West notes the “mechanical”
obedience of the Americans to the orders of the occupying army, blaming it on a
“destruction of individualism” (72–73), and writes that “under the Nationalistic
system each man’s duty was so exactly defined, that to go beyond its limits
was treason, and though men had not yet been by it degraded into absolute
machines” (109–10). Even modified by a “not yet,” West’s “degraded” ties Vinton’s
critique of Nationalism most explicitly to the labor politics of the 1890s, referring
simultaneously to the general threat posed to individual labor by factory work
and to the specific threat of degradation posed by the Chinese worker as a proxy
for industrial modernization.
These reversals, which are largely focused on personal character, align them-
selves with some significant historical reversals as well: the conquered American
population is sorted and then subjected to a reverse middle passage fully compa-
rable to the one endured by Chinese laborers or African slaves. Though many died
of death and disease en route, Li reminds his students, those who reached foreign
shores were not much better off: “sold at private sale and public auction as
laborers to whosoever would hire them, they became practically slaves. The
mortality among them is frightful to contemplate, but we may well doubt
if those who died were not more fortunate than those whose existence continued
for a longer term of years” (86). Meanwhile, steamer ships coming from China
repopulate the American coasts, so that by 2023 between one-third and half of the
population of any American state is Chinese.37
This reversal of the terms and logic of racial stereotype lays the ground for the
more complex dislocations that operate in the novel’s character and address.
Consider the second of the novel’s major paralepses: that the emplotment of its
major character is nowhere directly addressed, but instead appears purely as a
result of his alterations in narrative style. This occurs because Li devotes substan-
tial portions of his lectures to reading from the diaries of Julian and Leete West;
these diaries, though diegetically subordinate to Li’s voice, nonetheless occupy
an increasingly central role as the novel progresses.
37
By retaining the diction of contemporary American discourse about China, but inverting its
historical and stereotypical form, Vinton enacts one of the classic gestures of dystopian or satirical
fiction, one whose most perfect articulation comes in a film like The Planet of the Apes (itself, of course,
an allegory of the civil rights movement). The novel’s predictability in this field, however, must be
understood at least partly as a necessity of its genre: we need to think of the genre of dystopian fiction
as differing from science fiction not in its commitment to defamiliarization, but in the way that it
tends to produce defamiliarization via pure reversal (which helps explain why dystopian fiction is
generally uninteresting).
Why does this matter? Consider the differences between these two citations,
the first from Li, the second from West’s son, Leete:
No idea that they were to be deported had entered the heads of the drafted men
on the Commonwhen they were formed in lines and the roll of their names was
called; but when the armorers of the war vessels appeared and carts containing
chains and shackles were driven up, something of the truth became apparent.
The lines wavered, then broke into disorder, and the attempt of the armorers to
manacle those nearest to them, resulted in a rush that drove them back. Some
such resistance was expected by the Chinese commanders, and the Common
had been surrounded by a strong cordon of troops. These now advanced with
fixed bayonets until the rioters were huddled in a disorganized, indignant, and
terrified mass at one end of the Common. The bolder spirits among the
Americans wrenched off the branches of the trees, and using them as clubs
endeavored by a sudden rush to break through the ranks of the military. It was
at this point that the word “fire” was given, and a murderous discharge was
poured into the mass of unarmed, helpless rioters. (101–02)
She gave me a very graphic account of poor Jack Storiot’s death. He was
one of those who had been assembled on the Common for deportation, and
one of the first whom it had been attempted to manacle. We all knew Jack’s
high spirit and impetuosity, and I have no doubt that this insult of the
Chinese threw him into a great passion. He was one of the first to attack
the Chinese and fell most horribly mutilated. Margaretta told me that one of
the papers had published a list of those who had been killed or wounded in
this horrible massacre. The paper had been suppressed by the Chinese as soon
as it appeared, but the Nesmyth’s had fortunately been able to secure a copy,
and this she now brought to me. As I read over the list of names I saw many
that I knew; fortunately my intimate friends had not been there, but Tom
Hammond, Lafayette Brett, Babcock Tyler and Will Peckham were among the
killed, and Aleck Warner, Charlie Bell and several other old school friends
were among the wounded. It was an awful thing. I spoke of it that evening to
Commissioner Hi and he told me that no one could regret it more than the
Chinese did. It was one of the terrible results of war, to be excused only by its
necessity. “We have hearts,” he said, “but we must do our duty.” (153–54)
The same event described from two perspectives: the first contains no names,
no individual characterizations, no dialogue, and conceals its activity under a
string of passive constructions (four in the first sentence alone) of which the most
crucial appear in the final sentence, when the word “fire” is “given” and the
discharge is “poured,” in each case by no one in particular, into the bodies of the
rioters. The second is framed as dialogue and includes another one (Margaretta
gives Leete the account, Leete talks to Commissioner Hi), and contains an
individual characterization of one of the rioters, particular names and details,
an emotional reaction to the situation (“It was an awful thing”), and a discussion
of its value. Most importantly, Leete’s discussion of the newspaper list of those
killed, in drawing attention to the spread of information, shows how the story
one tells about an event depend on its circulation and distribution inside a
social field. Li’s lecture, on the other hand, takes that social field for granted—
or rather, it constitutes the dominant social field within which the
narrative circulates (like the Chinese in 2020, it suppresses the names of those
involved).
If one allows the difference between these two descriptions of the Boston
massacre to stand in for the more general difference between the mode of
narration that appears in Li’s lectures and the one that organizes the diaries,
one sees how the novel organizes itself around two different types of narration,
each of which is associated with a particular type of narrator (a Chinese professor,
two members of the American resistance), a particular temporality (2023 or
2020), and a formal relationship to novelistic discourse (diegesis vs. metadieg-
esis).38 The former is self-consciously aligned with an emphasis on historical
causality largely disconnected from individual actors, and communicates narra-
tive information in general statements characterized by passive or expletive
constructions (“There was, however, much suffering among those whose flight
had exhausted their credit cards” [124].). The latter relies on forms of emplot-
ment and character that much more closely resemble those of the traditional
novel.
One way to think about Looking Further Backward, then, is as the product of a
formal conflict between two modes of storytelling. The first is primarily indica-
tive; the second is primarily mimetic. The first “tells”; the second “shows.”
Because the novel begins and ends with Li’s voice, and because he reads the
diary sections aloud, these two modes are arranged in a diegetic hierarchy.
And yet the hierarchy established by the purely formal positioning of the narra-
tive modes in the novel is undermined by the fact of the novel’s increasing
38
All this doubled by the reference to the actual Boston massacre of 1770, at which only five
people died, the end of American independence thus recapitulating its beginning.
commitment to the metadiegetic diaries, which practically overwhelm the

lectures by the end of the book. All in all, more than half of the total volume of
Li’s fourteen lectures (that is, roughly 100 pages of a 179-page novel) is given over
to the West’s journals, including fully two-thirds of the lectures in the book’s
second half (about 69 of the last 100 pages).
This formal conflict is the product of actions happening inside the story,
rather than the result of decisions made by the “novel.” Li chooses to read the
diaries to his class; Li fills in his relatively bloodless narration of the Boston
massacre with details about Leete’s friend Jack and the suppression of the news by
the Chinese; nearly two-thirds of Li’s lectures ventriloquize two members of the
American resistance. From this perspective we can reimagine the novel as the
story of a year in the life of its Chinese lecturer. In such a reading, the conflict
between narrative modes is Li’s personal struggle with two competing modes of
narration, the first his expressed and conscious preference, the second his uncon-
scious, expressive one.39 The narrative space (measured in pages) the novel
accords to each of these two narrative modes indicates, then, both a formal
conflict and the effect of the development of Li’s character over the course of
the book. Narrative style is, indeed, the only line along which Li’s character can be
said to develop at all.40
If the narrative mode that gradually takes over the novel is explicitly marked as
both representational and American, then Li’s increasingly citational lectures
must be understood at least partly as personal accommodations of an American
style that does not—at least at the novel’s opening—seem to be his preferred
39
From a psychoanalytic perspective, one might argue that Won Lung Li’s ever-lengthening
citations of the diaries tell the story of a Chinese scholar of history at Shawmut College so caught up in
an Oedipal relationship with his predecessor that he gradually gives over his own narrational space to
him at the cost of losing his own voice. As West himself notes at one point, the typically Chinese
respect for ancestors seemed to provoke in the Chinese he met an increased admiration as he was,
thanks to the miracle of hypnotic sleep, something like 150 years old: “Ancestors and the men of
antiquity had been so long objects of veneration in the Celestial Empire, that I, who had been a
contemporary of their progenitors seemed in their opinion to be entitled to the same respect that they
entertained for those progenitors. They listened to me, therefore, as if the accumulated wisdom of two
centuries spoke in my words” (143). Here the novel offers a clue as to Li’s interest in West by making it
signify both in terms of a local Oedipal relationship (revolving around the chair of history at
Shawmut) and a cultural one.
40
My reading of the ways in which characters and narrative modes “compete” for space within
the limited framework of the novel owes a great deal to the work of Alex Woloch, who in The One vs.
the Many (Princeton, N.J., 2003) develops a narratological practice that analyzes the distribution of
“character-space” within a global “character-system,” and reads this formal structure as a crucial
feature of the novel’s historical development as a genre.
narrative mode. His description of the “Chinafication” of the United States (176)
is thus matched by an “Americanification” of his own speech, a gradual slide from
lectures that indicate history to diaries that privilege limited, individual experi-
ence over a structural explanation of “causes” and their “results” (17).41 From this
perspective, the novel is “about” not only the Chinese invasion of the United
States but also an individual intercultural experience in which a member of the
invading culture transforms himself (or is transformed) by narrating the history
of the invasion to which he belongs. Rather than a monodirectional tale of
invasion and conversion, then, the novel represents the mutual (and largely
unconscious) imbrication of the colonizer with the colonized, the Chinese
with the American, and the immediate present with the recent past. Though
the terms of that imbrication are hardly equal—at novel’s end, Li remains
a history professor, while West has been killed in combat—they nonetheless
complicate a sense of the novel’s temporal structure. Li’s narratological shifts
consistently recall us to the present tense of the novel’s narration, so that the
novel’s discourse (how it tells) continuously shadows its more spectacular
story (what it tells), in effect establishing another story-field within the novel’s
diegetic frame.
This structure, which turns Li into far more than a narratological amanuensis,
lays down the field of comprehensibility for the novel’s third major formal
disruption. This one has to do with the relationship between citizenship and
grammar and involves a shift in Li’s politics of address, which can now be read as
a crucial event inside the discourse-story the novel represents. Consider the first
sentence of Li’s first lecture to the Shawmut College freshmen: “I come before you
as a stranger. I am born of a race that the race you are born of has for centuries
been trained to think of as an inferior race” (10).
This “you” serves a double function. Motivated internally by the students to
whom Li speaks, it also addresses the novel’s 1890 readership. In fact, the “you”
makes more sense as a reference to nineteenth-century readers, since by 2023, the
students at Shawmut would have had three years to unlearn the idea of Chinese
racial inferiority and adjust to the fact that half the population of Boston was
of Chinese origin. Li’s “you,” retained throughout the novel, thus continually
41
Not that there is anything especially American about representation, or Chinese about
lecturing. Within the internal narrative economy of the novel, the transformation it narrates moves
from the United States to China at the political level, while moving from China to the United States at
the narrative one.
implicates the 1890 reader in a system of racial prejudice that the story’s progress
severely tests. Though it is perhaps not fair to say that the novel is narrated in the
second person, the relentless appearance of the second-person plural, by confus-
ing the novel’s real addressees with its fictional ones, subjects its readers to a
pedagogical mode of address that subordinates them to, and separates them from,
the text’s primary narrative voice.
All this changes in the final lecture. Li opens the discussion by noting that “it is
with regret that I cease to quote from Professor West’s diary,” before announcing
that “what I have to say to you to-day, in this, the closing lecture of your freshman
year, will be expressed to you in my own words” (177). Given what I have
described as the conflict between narrative modes, Li’s claim about his “own
words” appears to be the final salvo in a formal war, a bold recapturing of his
voice and a declaration of his independence from West’s political position and
storytelling style. The pages that follow occur entirely in Li’s preferred indicative
mode and give a brief sketch of the course of the Chinese takeover of the United
States, distinguishing sharply between the second person and the first: “At the
time that I speak to you, the Nationalists are hemmed in on all sides, save on the
frozen north, from communication with outside nations. The front line of our
armies forms a semi-circle stretching from Montreal south along the western base
of the Alleghenies to the Ohio . . .” (186–87; emphases mine).
And then we come to the novel’s final two paragraphs:
Let us now, in closing, consider hastily the benefits which the invasion of
the Chinese has brought to us.
We are no longer a defenseless people, ready to be subjugated by the

first armed nation that attacks. Our material prosperity was never greater.
Our soil supports a greater population than it did before. Chinese frugality
has replaced the wasteful lavishness that prevailed in private life under the
Nationalistic government. Woman no longer competes with man, but has
become as the Gods intended she should be, the handmaiden of male
humanity. What was good in Nationalism we have retained. What was bad
we have discarded and replaced by what is better. Under Nationalism,
individualism was reduced to a minimum; with us to-day it is honored
and given every chance to develop. (187–88)42
42
In her discussion of the Vinton novel, Pfaelzer writes that “the story ends with a passage from
Julian’s diary: he realizes that the Chinese have gained control of all but a small area of the mid-western
The first “us” is rhetorical. The second one, at the end of the first sentence,
arguably refers only to the Chinese. Beginning with the “we” of the second
paragraph, however, Li’s pronouns point unmistakably to the United States’
new population, conceiving himself and the students for the first time as mem-
bers of a single group. The grammatical unity supposes a political one; the
transformation of Li’s first person singular into the plural thus signals the
possibility of a new political subjectivity whose form of government is neither
purely Chinese nor purely Nationalist, but a mixture of both.
Because, as I’ve suggested, Li’s continual use of “you” determines much of the
novel’s fictional relationship to its doubled audience (students and reader), the
shift to “we” signals more than a simple call to patriotism. It invites the reader,
within the formal terms already privileged by the novel, to take on the burden of a
truly utopian, quasisocialist citizenship in which the positive aspects of Bella-
myian Nationalism—mainly the end of class warfare and the abolition of the gap
between rich and poor—are retained and leavened with a good dose of individu-
alism (and, not incidentally, of sexism).43 Never represented, only indicated, the
biracial, bicultural utopia to which Li refers in the novel’s final paragraphs
appears most visibly in the formal shift from “you” to “we,” where the novel’s
narrator and its audience, separated since the beginning of the novel, are finally
drawn together.
The awkward balance of these two emotional modes, which together comprise
the novel’s total structure of feeling, parallels the position of Vinton’s novel within
the larger discourse on China of his time. For nineteenth century progressives and
union activists, the mechanization of labor proceeded through its “Chinafica-
tion,” with American individualism (and its beefy manhood) under attack by
forms of factory work especially suited to Chinese bodies and their biological
impossibilities. In Vinton, however, it is the Chinese who save the misguided
American socialists from themselves: Bellamy’s utopian distribution of the bur-
den of labor produces precisely the kind of mechanized, docile population that
states, and he knows that ‘it’s just a matter of time before they close in’” (68). Pfaelzer must be referring
to a different edition of the book, though none exists that I know of. My edition ends as I describe it
above. A version of the phrase Pfaelzer cites appears in Li’s final lecture, not West’s diary, and is given
in my edition as “It is but a question of time when we close in upon the last remnant of the
Nationalists” (187).
43
Indeed the transnational, transracial “we” here, spoken to an audience of presumably male
college students, gains much from its exclusion of women (now “handmaidens of male humanity”)
from the labor force and the classroom, something that men of every race and nation can apparently
agree on.
union activists feared would result from widespread proletarianization in the first
place. This is at some level not surprising; “the enemies of Utopia sooner or later
turn out to be the enemies of socialism.”44 But Vinton’s detournenment of the
Chinese position in American racial politics did more than discredit socialism; by
so obviously reversing the rhetorical function of the Chinese, Looking Further
Backward revealed how malleable the Chinese were as a figure for American
futurity. And in turning them to this particular use—in imagining them, that
is, as the historical preservers of individualism—Vinton also made the Chinese
the best Americans of all: cultured, civilized, capable of ordering a massacre and
of weeping at its unhappy results, the novel’s Chinese figure a relation to
modernity that is simultaneously sympathetic and productive, compassionate
and mercenary. The novel thus turns the idea of Chinese stasis and stagnation, so
common a part of the nineteenth-century stereotype, into a beneficial trait. It is
precisely by not changing that China returns to the West—if only through the
barrel of a gun—the values the latter left behind in its progressive, future-oriented
and suspiciously European fervor for ideas.
Having spent the novel’s first 178 pages feeling badly about the American
setbacks, or identifying with West’s frustrated attempts to prompt the machine-
like Nationalists to react appropriately to invasion, what did Vinton’s readers
think of this seemingly belated attempt to turn history’s lemons into lemonade?
If, as Raymond Williams has suggested, novels are useful because they can
establish in advance of politics a “structure of feeling” that provides readers
with an emotional and/or experiential framework through which to grasp mate-
rial transformations in their worlds—if, that is, novels express, sometimes un-
consciously, new apprehensions of the present into which they emerge—then
whatever emotional work Vinton’s novel does belongs to a complex structure of
feeling indeed.45 For such a structure must include, if it is to be complete, both
the generally dystopian, bleak events of most of the novel, with all their startling
inversions and threats about the military weaknesses of socialism, and the
final two paragraphs, which promise a militarily robust, individually-oriented,
44
Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian
Discourse,” Diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977), 3.
45
Williams defines a “structure of feeling” as “a social experience still in process, often indeed not
yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and isolating,” and as “a cultural
hypothesis” about the nature of a social present still in the process of emerging (Marxism and
Literature [Oxford, 1977], 132–33.).
quasi-utopian America that differs from the United States of 1890 in having
become at least partly socialist: Nationalism with Chinese characteristics. What
the novel gives readers to grasp, that is, is an emotional complex that recognizes
the limitations of the present—Vinton writes in the preface that “the existence of
great private fortunes is a menace to the welfare of the State” (6)—and then
punishes readers for believing in Bellamy’s utopian resolution to those limita-
tions by forcing them through the emotionally difficult loss of his Nationalist
solution. The suffering of the novel’s Americans, like the frustration of the Wests
at the mechanically slow response of the Nationalists to invasion, is intended to
make the reader suffer as well: in fact, one might say that the novel’s
argument against Bellamy occurs largely on the basis of the emotional
evidence provided by the identificatory suffering it causes. That the novel finally
offers the reader a happy ending suggests that it aims to force the reader to pass
through that suffering into a contented and sympathetic recognition of its neces-
sity. The reader’s final emotional position resembles that of the Chinese officers
who weep over the massacre in Boston: the suffering they witness, though
terrible, speeds the production of an ameliorated, post-Bellamyian socialism
that protects individualism and remains strong on national defense. Becoming
the interpellated subject of Vinton’s utopia requires a recognition of the
importance of bearing without political complaint the suffering required to
produce it.
4. Learning to Lose
In forcing the American reader to endure transformative suffering, by redeeming

that suffering through the literary mechanism of the Chinese army, the novel
encodes but does not represent the relationship between endurance and labor that
drove the nineteenth-century Asiatic stereotype. The coolie is, in fact, never seen
in the novel—only in the least embodied, most moral-philosophical ways does
the question of a “Chinese” relation to suffering appear in Looking Further
Backward at all (in Li’s descriptions of the weeping officers, for instance). But
suffering occurs—displaced, as with the novel’s narrative or its political union,
into another register—onto the bodies of the Americans enslaved and killed by
the Chinese. And their suffering is the result of the United States’ adoption of a
form of labor designed to eliminate suffering from labor: it is because the
Americans implement Bellamyite Nationalism that they eventually must be killed
in Boston and New York or sold into slavery abroad.
Though the idea that suffering is part of life is nothing new, the ideological
shape of the argument made in the United States in the late nineteenth century
allows us to see this recognition in Vinton as part of the larger historical process
whereby the modern relation to suffering was articulated and framed. Recalling
now Talal Asad’s claim that the West’s “humanizing the world” created colonial
subjects with appropriately modern relations to suffering and sympathy, and thus
to the difference between wasteful and necessary pain, I wish to suggest here that
Vinton’s novel allows us to extend Asad’s analysis to Europe and the United States
as well. The humanization of the world and the recognition of the values of
“necessary” suffering were values that had to be communicated to (and indeed
imposed on) the national populations who were presumably the source of their
philosophical origin. For it is clearly the message of Looking Further Backward
that certain kinds of suffering must be endured and that the violent necessity of
even something like a middle passage might, with enough perspective, be accept-
ed as a regrettable side effect of the production of a freer world. If the novel has a
structure of feeling, it is one that establishes through the manipulations of its
formal and thematic properties the “truth” of this new system, in which the
suffering of slavery and murder become the price of a politico-economic struc-
ture that accommodates the necessities of modern labor while retaining a respect
for individualism. The fact that the novel never portrays the results of its utopian
program—the only hint of its presence comes in Li’s final paragraphs—suggests
how difficult it must have been to actually imagine. This imaginary future
functions, unrepresented, more as the novel’s dream than as its fulfilled wish;
indeed, one of the ironies of the novel is that the entire invasion has to happen,
and Li must go through an elaborate ballet around narrative form, only to get to
the point where such a system can be referred to, if not exactly imagined into
being.
This imaginative impasse illustrates the limits of the novel’s compromise with
“Asiatic form,” this latter understood as the relation between monotony, labor,
and capital embodied in the “coolie” figure. Rather than seek to undo the losses
caused by industrialized modernity, and thus attempt to preserve in fiction the
purer, whiter, more Jacksonian America to which industrialism was opposed,
Vinton’s narrative attempts to think the possibility of a future defined by the
combination of Chineseness and labor, a future it imagines as the permanent
structure of modern life. The loss that such a future constitutes produces
the “happy” ending that makes the novel’s emotional structure so weird, since
the resolution of the problems of industrial capitalism can only occur through the
suffering caused by the novel’s refusal, having made the Chinese a deus ex
machina of American history, to relegate them back to the historical margins
where they “belonged.” In this, the novel is quite different than Jack London’s
“The Unparalleled Invasion,” where the rise of China produces world unity and a
decision to wipe out all the Chinese. For Vinton, by contrast, the American
landscape, insofar as it is also the landscape of modernity, is now and will
continue to be “Asiatic” in “formation and scenery,” because the very nature of
the world has in fact become “Asiatic” as well.
Rather than leading, as it does in the more dystopian narratives of Chinese
invasion, to a deadening automatization of the American people and the end
of “freedom,” the novel’s “Chinafication” of the United States is thus the cost of
freedom’s purchase. In this sense the political warfare of the novel functions as an
allegory for the economic situation to which “China” generally referred in the late
nineteenth century (just as any literal Chinese “invasion” metaphorizes the Chi-
nese immigration to which “invasion” referred figuratively in the first place).
Buried in the novel’s acceptance of a political domination by the Chinese is thus
an insight about the nature of capitalism and the globalization of the labor market
that has historically been difficult to come to terms with, namely the notion that
the production of transnational networks of labor and trade undermines the
isolability and independence of the nation-state.46 Vinton’s abandonment of the
political concept of the United States is essentially the mark of that recognition,
though the novel is at its most utopian when it suggests that American individu-
alism could, unlike the nation-state, be retained in the future Chinese colony.
What happens, in this future, to the Chinese “coolie”? The crucial figure in so
much of the discourse about China and the American future makes no appear-
ance in Vinton’s novel at all. Here one might say, as Walter Benjamin did of the
masses in the oeuvre of Charles Baudelaire, that Vinton’s “most important
subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form.”47 The coolie’s “ab-
sence” from the novel functions as a determining negative space, an ideological
black hole around which the novel revolves and from which it cannot escape.
46
In Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics,
Laura Otis shows how the discovery of the cell and the development of vaccines for contagious diseases
prompted anxious imperialists to frame control of national borders in a variety of organic metaphors,
particularly ones organized around the possibility that viruses pass into the body by “passing” as its
legitimate citizens (Baltimore, 1999).
47
Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism
(London, 1983), 122.
Vinton’s Chinese resemble Julian West more than they do the American Nation-
alists; in many ways, they are simply the ghosts of the good nineteenth century
haunting the United States into remembering its forgotten values. Only in the
presence of his major feature—the ability to suffer, to endure without complaint
the cost of an “Asiatic” modernity—do we see the shadow presence of the coolie
in this novel. By novel’s end, everyone still living must accept this cost, and the
reader is enjoined to imagine himself (via the interpellating “you” of Li’s final
words) as yet another citizen of the novel’s new Chinese America. This is the
emotional task Li proposes at the end of the novel: that the reader should give up
on the hierarchies of cultural or racial superiority that sustained anti-Chinese
discourse in the nineteenth century—and that helped make it such a useful figure
for the economic problems it represented—as the price of imagining modernity’s
post-Nationalist, and post-nationalist, future: that readers, in short, learn to be
like coolies (in their relation to suffering and self-directed sympathy) so that they
wouldn’t have to become them.
While during the eras of George Henry Mason and Peter Parker the Euro-
American experience of Chineseness at home dealt mostly with transnationalism
in the form of the circulation of Chinese things—abetted by the travels of
Western people who inaugurated the trade in them—the American late nine-
teenth century is where the West confronts for the first time the large-scale
circulation of Chinese people. The stakes were accordingly raised, as the economic
threat posed by Chinese labor threatened with an immediacy unavailable to a box
of tea or a theory of sympathy the integrity of an experience and way of life that
most American and British writers identified as the West’s exclusive civilizational
province (think of Arthur Smith on the Krupp gun). Ironically, of course, one
“solution” to this ideological problem involved—as it did, perhaps, in Mason,
and as it does so often in racial discourse, conceiving of people as “things.”48 But a
particular kind of things: the issue with Chinese workers was not that they were
inhuman as such but rather that their humanity itself was inhumane, not only in
its indifference to the suffering of others (by then an old story) but in its
willingness to take its own suffering for granted; the Chinese, that is, were like
animals but were not animals, which is why so much time had to be spent
insisting that they were like them.
48
My thoughts here are very much influenced by a recent essay by Christopher Bush, “The
Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age,” Representations 99 (Summer 2007).
Into this scene, whose outlines are by now well known, Vinton’s novel came
and went. The complex play of commensurability and incommensurability
Looking Further Backward organizes around the anti-Chinese discourse it knew
does not make it “ahead” of its time in any sense; it is, rather, completely of
its time without for all that being identical with it. The coolie’s biologically
impossible body threatened a future in which modernity had to be “endured”
rather than fought off—and, thus, a future in which the condition of the coolie’s
suffering body was to become the condition of all bodies everywhere. By moving
the problem of that suffering into the affective register, Vinton purchased the
utopia engendered by the conflagration of modernity at the price of an enduring
loss, one whose suffering was the very condition of the possibility of a future
without coolie labor. And although the fact that Looking Further Backward
generates this return of suffering through the Chinese army shows how close it
was to the imaginary of the late nineteenth-century United States, that it was the
Americans who suffered most from the narration shows how far Vinton was
willing to go to think the terms of the system that tied the American future to
China without, like so many others, eliminating one of those terms through legal
or physical violence. Still, the novel’s violence is at least partly genocidal. It thus
apprehends how deeply the Western perception of Chinese suffering had to do
with the possibility of genocidal transformation, though not, as Vinton is practi-
cally alone in imagining, of the Chinese as a race, but of the very possibility of
an organic human subjectivity disconnected from the suffering of alienated
labor. This does not invalidate the idea of an ontological link between Chinese-
ness and suffering, but reconfirms it, though in a more global and self-directed
register.
6. The Anthropomorphic Aperture
Connecting the history of Asiatic form explicitly to the anxieties faced by

mainstream American culture about both exoticism and technology shows how
the Asian body in America has always been (seen as) a doubled or doubly
mediated figure, forced to bear on its surface the mutually intermediating con-
cepts of racial otherness and industrial modernization. In the American context,
that body’s figural duplicity has most often been marked by the convention of
calling it “inscrutable,” suggesting that its exterior surface conceals an unavailable
internal meaning. Indeed one might think of all the ink spilled on explaining the
Chinese in the late nineteenth century as an attempt simultaneously to undo and
preserve that inscrutability, the project of explaining its mysteries raveled with the
pleasure of reveling in its irreducible strangeness.
That this inscrutability revealed itself again and again in the faces, manners, and
speech of particular Chinese bodies suggests that the duplicity of the Chinese as an
ideological figure (signaling simultaneously past and future, racial primitivism
and modernization, suffering and a possible end to suffering via indifference) was
best made intelligible by giving it an anthropomorphic form. To be in the presence
of an Asiatic figure, and, by extension, to be in the presence of an Asiatic body
already layered over with this figure as stereotype, meant for many Americans
feeling threatened by the visible duplicity of an embodied, human sign. Or, to be
in the presence of the visible duplicity of an embodied, human sign was to be
in the presence, by definition, of something Asiatic: past and future, animal and
superman.
Though the claim that the Chinese were “inscrutable” attributes this uncer-
tainty to the subjective surfaces of the Chinese face (inexpressive) or language
(impenetrable), it may be truer to say that the representational uncertainty
provoked by the Chinese resided with the encounter with a form of racial and
cultural otherness that posed (or was made to pose) so insistently the complex,
multifaceted questions of labor, or globalization, and of modernization. Arthur
Smith, for instance, refers early on in Chinese Characteristics to “a wood-cut
representing an oak tree, in the outlines of which the observer is invited to detect
a profile of Napoleon on the island of St. Helena, standing with bowed head and
folded arms. Protracted contemplation frequently fails to discover any such
profile, and it would seem that there must be some mistake, but when once it is
clearly pointed out, it is impossible to look at the picture and not see Napoleon
too. In like manner, many things are to be seen in China which do not at first
appear, and many of them once seen are never forgotten” (CC, 11–12). Like the
image of Napoleon and the oak tree, the Chinese surface was representationally
ambiguous, presenting now this face, now that one, leaving the American observer
with the sense that there might always be another picture in the picture. If the
surface exterior of the Asiatic was, as Colleen Lye suggests, “modernization
rendered visible,”49 it was because the Asiatic body represented to (white) America
the newly created subject of modern technology and modern labor, born to endure
processes occurring on scales extreme enough to exceed the measure of “humani-
ty” itself, making it impossible to see all aspects of the world picture at the same
49
Lye, America’s Asia, 94.
time. So the complex and multiple truth of the Chinese as a figure, the degree to
which it united in a single object the contradictions of the American experience of
its modern future, became the falsehood attributed to the Chinese as people, as
though the multiple representational functions the Chinese figure was made to
bear in white America could only be perceived as an anthropomorphized cascade
of masks and misrepresentations that concealed some withheld inner kernel.
Perhaps because American ideas about the Chinese so insistently returned to
the question of bodies, to the physical ability to endure the conditions of modern
life and modern labor without complaint (for example, the ability to survive on a
near-starvation diet), work in Asian American Studies has consistently thought of
race as located most fundamentally in a set of human minds and human bodies.
Lye argues, to the contrary, that the structures that make the Asiatic a figure
for (and index of) globalizing labor markets suggest that race is not a human
concept but an economic one, that the “form” governing its representation and
even its phenomenological experience owes more to the movements of capital
than to the white perception of racial otherness. Considered within the frame-
work of this discussion, the lesson might be, pushing Lye’s insight one step
further, that the body itself is not an anthropomorphic object, at the same time
that it is the original and least distorted of all anthropomorphisms—the only
anthropomorphic object, one might say, that is completely like itself. The experi-
ence of the Chinese as duplicitous is a recognition—and rejection, given the
negative connotations of “duplicitous”—of this complex and frequently unwel-
come truth, of the ways in which bodies, in becoming vehicles of historical and
economic meaning, leave behind their status as the naked, fleshy apertures
of some purer and more apparently original form of being. (Pheng Cheah:
“Humanity and all its capacities are . . . product-effects generated by forces that
precede and exceed the anthropos.”50)
Lye’s forceful de-anthropomorphization of the concept of race in the Ameri-
can context thus leads us to a broader theory of the disappointments of what one
might call anthropomorphic desire, that is, of the disappointments produced by
the awareness that an originary fantasy of the body’s personal and human
simplicity can only be thought in relation to such larger and more inhuman
concepts as transnationalism, diaspora, globalization, or the history of the means
of production. Utopian fiction has long been one of the means by which humans
50
Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge,
Mass., 2007), 10.
have reconciled these two seemingly incommensurable modes of historical time

(which Fredric Jameson has called the “lived” and the “geologic”).51 In Looking
Further Backward, we see how Vinton’s transformation and universalization
of the coolie’s embodied suffering into an affective and future-oriented
register is only possible because of the novel’s grasp of the malleability of the
coolie’s anthropomorphic form, so that Vinton’s imaginary future retains the
conceptual and ideological kernel of the coolie (the unity of modernity and
suffering) while shedding its physical husk and—more or less—its racial and
cultural specificity.
But the unceasing repetition of fantasies about the coolie’s body, which have in
our time given way to larger-scale anxieties about the low cost of Chinese labor
(understood not as a racial feature but as an economic one) and about the
physically dangerous and abusive working conditions in Chinese factories (here
“racial” form still echoes), remind us that the other side of our recognition of the
body’s nonanthropomorphism is its relentless return to the anthropomorphic,
that is, to a sense of the body as the most basic and truest idiom of individual
experience and historical interpretation. It is tempting to describe the relation
between these two concepts of the body as dialectical, the movement between the
body as phenomenological base and the body as cultural superstructure thus
defining one major organizing framework of Western thought since, say, the
intellectual revolutions produced by Hegel or Marx.
This would require, however, ceding the very premise of the argument,
because such a dialectic would imagine that the “original” and fully self-sufficient
body were not, like the body that figures modes of production, itself already a
figure for something, namely, for the lack or absence of distorting figuration.52
The opposition is not between the nonfigural and the figural, but between a figure
of nonfiguration and a figure that wears its figuration openly. Into this lopsided
dialectic—for it turns out that both its thesis and antithesis are, finally, on the
same side—strides the “Chinese body,” whose duplicity encoded the anathematic
awareness that the honest and open body it fails to be is in fact the one it most
accurately represents. And likewise, crucially, as regards the coolie’s relation to
pain: in Vinton’s novel, what is the transformation of the racially specific experi-
ence of physical suffering into a generalized one, after all, but the extension of an
experience belonging to a single type of body to the entire realm of human being?
51
“Actually Existing Marxism,” Polygraph, 6–7 (1993): 170–95.
52
Here we see that in being a figure for the lack of figuration, the “human” or “original” body
effectively represents to us the ideal of a “genuinely” real body that could never exist.
Carried from the “inside” of the Chinese figure to a universal “outside,” from
physiology to affect, suffering’s travels figure the movement from an inscrutable
inner life oriented around a mystery of otherness to the expression of a coherent
logic of national self-defense that recognizes that some forms of pain are the cost
of an “individual” human future liberated from the yawning threat of the human
machine.
Placed in the open, the experience of suffering reveals itself as the fundamental
condition of Vinton’s utopian modernity, while the Chinese, stripped of their
private racial relation to pain, become as “American” as anyone else in the
diegesis—which is why it doesn’t matter that the Chinese army creates a hybrid
nation full of immigrants. When Julian West—whose last name had signaled in
Bellamy’s Looking Backward the replacement of the nineteenth century’s frontier
of space to the twenty-first century’s frontier of time—dies in the battle of Lake
Erie in Vinton’s novel, the nineteenth century dies with him. And Won Lung
Li becomes the end of history’s “last man,” narrating to a captive audience
the grammatical accommodation with sympathy which, in externalizing pain’s
Asiatic form, makes that form the condition of a universal modernity whose
idiom is the transpacific.53
53
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992), drawing on a
particularly Kojèvian Hegel, produced another version of a relation to universal modernity, three years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s argument that “a uniform horizon of economic produc-
tion possibilities” “guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their
historical origins or cultural inheritances,” resembles in a number of ways the universalism Vinton
imagined a century earlier, though in a more positive mode (xiv).
5 Bertrand Russell’s Chinese
Eyes; or, Modernism’s Double
Vision
When an event is considered at close quarters, at the moment when it is lived through,
everything seems subject to chance: one man’s ambition, some lucky encounter, some local
circumstance or other appears to have been decisive. But chance happenings offset each other,
and facts in their multiplicity coalesce and show up a certain way of taking a stand in relation
to the human situation, reveal in fact an event which has its definite outline and about which
we can talk.
—Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Anyone who rifles through the boxes of miscellaneous material that are part of
the Peter Parker collection at the Yale University Medical Library will find
preserved—in the fifth series of the first box—a pair of letters. The exchange,
dated April 1935, occurred between Secretary of the University Carl Lohmann and
Milton C. Winternitz, then in his last year as dean of the university’s medical
school. It opens with a note from Lohmann:
April 9, 1935
Dear Dean Winternitz:
Among other things which accompanied the Canton Hospital-Cadbury-

Peter Parker correspondence was the enclosed Chinese document.
172
BERTRAND RUSSELL’S CHINESE EYES 173
Thinking that it was an expression of high sentiments expressed by some

Oriental savant for our beloved University, I asked Professor Asakawa to
take a hasty skedaddle through it.1 It turns out to be the request of a
druggist, one Kwang Wan Lung Hing, that somebody pay some attention
to an unpaid bill. I patronize our local druggist as I am constantly re-
minded to do by placards in the street cars. I regret that I am not the one
addressed. Maybe it is yours.
Sincerely yours,
C.A.L.
Winternitz responded in a similarly playful mood the following day:
Dear Carl:
During the past few months I have reached the point where I can no longer
understand bills which are submitted in good old Anglo-Saxon. How
would you expect me to interpret a Chinese manuscript? I thought it
was a new form of art after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, so I
guess I was further off than you were. Be this as it may, the document is an
exquisite one.
Sincerely,
M.C. Winternitz, M.D.
The letters’ humor results from the movement from high to low. In Lohmann’s
letter, what begins as a “document” and “expression of high sentiments” turns out
to be, following a linguistic “skedaddle,” simply a druggist’s request for payment.
Winternitz, likewise amused, repeats Lohmann’s differentiation between low bill
and high manuscript, playing with the idea of Chinese writing as a mark of high
civilizational history and the ordinariness of commerce. The reference to Stein
I will say more about in a moment, but for now direct your attention to Winter-
nitz’s final line, which returns the bill to a “high” position by referring to it not
only as a “document”—the term Lohmann uses in his first sentence—but as an
1
Asakawa Kan’ichi, an historian and political scientist who began teaching history at Yale
University in 1907 (he was simultaneously curator of the Asian collections in the library).
“exquisite document.” The “Be this as it may” that introduces this characterization
announces the turn away from humor and back to seriousness, and so insists that
despite the fact that this piece of paper is a bill, it is “exquisite” simply because it is
written in Chinese. That the druggist’s bill remains, even after its function has been
recognized, an “exquisite” document, that its movement from “manuscript” to
invoice does not disturb, finally, the exquisiteness of its presence as visual image,
indicates once again how powerfully Chinese writing has operated in the Western
imagination of the past few centuries.2
Some measure of that power finds its way into Winternitz’s mention of
Gertrude Stein. The reference is topical: Stein had been on a triumphant lecture
tour of the United States since 1934. She was the most famous literary figure of the
moment, a celebrity whose dinner party remarks were reported in the gossip
pages and whose talks drew audiences of hundreds of curious and eager listeners.
Stein’s literary signature, the repetitive and elliptical style popularized by the
phrase “a rose is a rose is a rose,” became the much-imitated subject of newspaper
columnists and other writers around the country.3 That Winternitz could joke
that a document written in a foreign language struck him as “after the fashion of
Gertrude Stein’s poetry” reflected both the widespread popularity of Stein’s work
and the ways in which the deliberate obscurities of her style had come to figure a
general idea of what a “new form of art” could be in 1930s America.
Whatever inexact resemblance brought together Stein’s style and Chinese
writing for Winternitz can be placed within the broader question of China’s
relation to Anglo-American modernism, a relation that owed much to the well-
known work done by modernist poets to translate Chinese philosophy and poetry
and to claim them for their own aesthetic and intellectual heritage; the publica-
tion of Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry in Cathay in 1915 and of
2
Those operations are the subject of a great deal of critical work. A classic example of the critique
of the fetish of Chinese writing that also fetishizes Chinese writing is Jacques Derrida’s Of Gramma-
tology, but Derrida is already going back to G. W. Leibniz, whose dream of a pure language briefly and
hopefully made Chinese its avatar. Rey Chow has a summary and critique of Derrida’s claims about
Chinese writing in chapter 2 of The Protestant Ethnic & the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 2002). See
also Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, 2002).
3
Following the surprise press conference convened as Stein’s ship came into New York harbor on
October 24, 1934, for instance, headlines in the New York papers included “Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is
Back Home Home Back,” “Gertrude Stein Barges In With a Stein Song to Stein,” and “Gertrude Stein,
Stein is Back Back, and It’s Still All Black, Black” (Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A
Biography of Gertrude Stein [New York, 1975], 177). A presentation at Princeton by Heather O’Donnell
directed my attention to this habit. As for a specific Yale connection, on November 4, Stein attended
the Yale–Dartmouth football game with Alfred Harcourt.
Amy Lowell’s in the collections of imagist poetry published in the latter half
of that decade suggested that modernism’s difficult language and rejection of
conventions of meter and rhyme owed something to the far East. By the time
Winternitz could joke that a druggist’s bill written in Chinese had appeared to be
a new art form in Stein’s distinctive style, the idea that some connection existed
between China and new modes of writing deviating ever farther from common
sense forms of reference and meaning had already been expressed by many of the
modernists themselves. In this context, his joke about the resemblance between a
Chinese druggist’s bill and Stein-like art, however much it depended on a
culturally distorted notion of the meaning of Chinese writing as “exquisite,”
makes a fairly reasonable connection.
That connection’s value for understanding modernism has been the subject of
much critical work in the last decade. Scholars like Robert Kern, Zhaoming Qian,
and Steven G. Yao, among many others, have sought to grasp the consequences of
the modernists’ appeal to China for the meaning and history of modernism as a
literary and cultural movement whose origins have conventionally been thought
of as purely Western.4 The fate of that critical work within the modernist studies
has been mixed: evidence of China’s importance to modernism’s early history
has only occasionally influenced narratives of modernism’s origins in European
industrialization, philosophy, and aesthetics. For someone interested in under-
mining the integrity of the national or supranational categories that tend to drive
literary work, the slightness of this influence has been a bit frustrating. It suggests
that too much scholarship on modernism remains caught in a monolingual,
monocultural narrative in which the effect of a variety of transnational “outsides”
can only be an interesting or informative sidelight to the real work of under-
standing what Anglo-American modernism of the early twentieth century was
and what it can mean today.5 As I will go on to suggest in the remainder of this
4
Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge, 1996); Zhaoming
Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, N.C., 1995);
Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (New York,
2002). See also Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor, 1997); Huang
Guiyou, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China and America (Cranbury, N.J., 1997); and
Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-
Century American Literature (Berkeley, 2002).
5
If I am being precise by adding adjectives to “modernism,” it is because I am trying to avoid
using “modernism” in general to mean “Anglo-American modernism between 1914 and 1922,” or some
other restricted phrase. This in order to resist the Anglocentrism of the standard narrative as it applies
to geography, language, and time. Any discussion of a particular modernism is also, of course, a
discussion of the meaning of modernism in general; though this is not the place explicitly to make the
chapter, the solution to nationally limited approaches to modernism is not to

place some other nation at modernism’s center but rather to recognize the
limitations of originality, to see that the influences—even the apparently internal
ones—on the development of such an aesthetic and cultural mode as modernism
must be thought outside the boundaries of a single language, a single historical
moment, or a single national formation.
More so than the other chapters of this book, then, this chapter intervenes in a
local and specific critical field. It describes some features of the current state of
scholarship in Anglo-American modernism and the critical habits I see there, and
to elaborate a possible alternative to those habits. Because the crucial analytic
turn within the broader discussion will rely on a single modernist perception of a
Chinese relation to physical pain, the chapter takes its place in this book as an
example (and not an elaboration) of the potential critical value of the historical
work I have pursued so far. Remembering the attention I have given in previous
chapters to the fact of mediatic or typological forms (anecdotes, books of types,
medical case reports, science fictions), it seems worth saying that as example, this
example will also serve as a figure for one of the book’s most vital metacritical
tasks, namely the expression of a methodology that can understand the historical
and cultural work of China in the West outside of conventional notions of
influence, authenticity, and origin.
1. What a Line Does
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her
canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines
running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the
attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she
asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were
empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as
if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was
argument, my preference rests with a far more geographically and temporally open version of the
general category, of the type elaborated in the recent work of Susan Stanford Friedman. See, for
instance, her “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of
Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (Sept 2006). See also Eric Hayot, “Modernisms’
Chinas: Introduction,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18.1 (Spring 2006).
done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme
fatigue, I have had my vision.6
The charm of imaginary art, like that of imaginary artists, lies in its unim-
aginability; whatever it does, however it produces and organizes an aesthetic
world internal to the novelistic or poetic space in which it appears, in the end
justifies itself directly in proportion to the audience’s inability to evaluate it on
terms other than its own. Lily Briscoe finds her central line, draws it, declares
her canvas done, her vision had: the novel ends. The conjunction of that metafic-
tional ending and Lily’s line guarantees, more than any mental picture of her
painting, the authority and legitimacy of her judgment. And the vectoring
together of these two separate worlds—one the coastal Britain of Virginia Woolf ’s
To the Lighthouse, the other the landscape of a particular reading—invites just
like any metafiction a consideration of their interaction as ideas, a productive,
pleasant confusion between the “I” and the “vision” that belong properly to Lily
in one context but might, in another, be said to be properties of VirginiaWoolf,
whose vision also announces its closure in the blankness of the page below these,
the final lines of Woolf ’s novel. Whatever aesthetic is articulated here doubles
itself in the coincidence of closure, referring to Lily’s world and to Woolf ’s all
at once.
The coincidences that produce an immediately compelling connection be-
tween Lily Briscoe and Virginia Woolf have made Lily a central figure in the
history of Bloomsbury modernism. Two recent books in modernist studies
reinforce such a reading, testifying to the generative force of Woolf ’s novel and
to the ongoing struggle to define and understand modernism, a literary move-
ment that has seemed in recent years to approach the present more and more
closely instead of receding, as it should, into its proper historical moment.
Both books—Anne Banfield’s The Phantom Table, and Patricia Laurence’s Lily
Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes—attempt through historical and cultural analysis of Woolf
and her circle to describe the origin of modernist style and to find explanations
for the monumental formal shifts that defined the movement.7 The origins they
find are, however, quite different, and it is their difference I wish to explore in this
6
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego, 1981), 207; further references in the text are cited
as TTL.
7
Anne Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism
(Cambridge, 2000); further references in the text are cited as PT; Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s
Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia, S.C., 2003); further references in the text
are cited as LB.
chapter, with a sense that it expresses something about the current shape of
modernist studies. In what follows, I begin by reviewing the argument of both
books, showing how each of them manages to put similar textual facts to radically
dissimilar uses. This review leads to a sticking point, a moment at which the
difference in the historical claims about Bloomsbury’s origins separate the two
analyses. At that moment, the chapter will diverge, producing a close reading of
the life of one major Bloomsbury figure, Bertrand Russell. That Russell happened
to observe, in 1922, that one of the major faults of the Chinese people was their
callous disregard of the suffering of others will allow the major themes of
the book to coincide with the discussion of modernism. This conjunction
will generate not only a new reading of the “origins” of one important strain
of Anglo-American modernism but also a way of thinking modernism compara-
tively—as simultaneously inside and outside an internationalist frame that in-
cludes China, sympathy, and the literary experience of a total planetary
indifference to human pain.
Banfield’s The Phantom Table borrows its title from Andrew Ramsay’s expla-
nation to Lily about what kind of philosophy his father does: “Subject and object
and the nature of reality,” he says. “Think of a kitchen table . . . when you’re not
there” (PT, 23).8 That Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher of the unseen kitchen table is
not, Banfield argues, a coincidence. Rather, this fact places Mr. Ramsay (and, by
extension, Lily, Mrs. Ramsay, all of To the Lighthouse) squarely within the frame of
the most important currents in English philosophical thought of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. The major figures discussed are Woolf ’s
father, Leslie Stephen; the Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore, Russell, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein; and the aesthetic theorist Roger Fry, each of whom played
a major role in creating an atmosphere in which Woolf and the rest of Blooms-
bury could move from the problem of a kitchen table to a broad theory of
subjects, objects, and sensations.
Among the philosophers, it was Russell, Banfield argues, who exerted the
greatest influence on Bloomsbury’s modernism; though other studies have rele-
gated him to the sidelines and given pride of place to Wittgenstein, The Phantom
Table shows that Bloomsbury cannot be thought seriously without Russell’s
work.9 The core of Russell’s Realism, Banfield argues, lies in his theory of
8
Lily Briscoe refers to a “phantom kitchen table” later on that same page.
9
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reception today surely has a great deal to do with the degree to which his
writing functions so well alongside poststructuralist theory; Marjorie Perloff ’s claim that such readings
“sensibilia,” his name for sense-data unperceived by any particular subject. “In
Russell’s conception, in some sense the private world is already there, like an
empty room or chair, to receive the subject and in that sense independent of it,
imposing a skeletal framework on his point of view” (PT, 73). When a person
walks into a room and stands between two other people already there, Russell
wrote, “a third world, intermediate between the two previous worlds, begins
to be perceived” (PT, 73). The subject is thus at the center of a “here” and a
“now,” but any given center or perspective is subjectively neutral, simply an
effect of relations in space and the potential reception of sense-data. The result,
Banfield says, “is a theory of knowledge with at its center the strange notion of a
subjectless subjectivity,” a subject more like a photographic plate than a “person”
(PT, 70).
Whether or not such a theory accurately describes the world is not the point;
Banfield aims instead to explain a particular theory of knowledge and demon-
strate its relation to modernism. “The debate about modernism stands in need of
a new formulation,” she writes, “which takes into account its revolutionary
conception of the objects of sensation, at once physical and subjective” (xi).
This is where Woolf comes in. Banfield’s argument is not simply that Woolf
wrote about this new conception of objects (in which case, the mention of a
phantom table would do the trick), but rather that she wrote through it, that her
fictions not only refer to a Russellian epistemology, but articulate it, manipulate
it, and revise it. Russell’s “here” and “now” become, for instance, Woolf ’s well-
known “moment,” a local time “not simply equivalent to the present” (PT, 118).
Grasped as the center from which perception recedes to a misty circumference,
the Woolfian moment makes the here-ness and now-ness of the present explicit,
holding it still in a collocation not yet subjected to time or memory. When
no human subject exists to observe the moment, as in the second section of
To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes,” the novel’s “nows” lose their connection
to public time, so that the “nights now are full of wind and destruction,” and
require significant distortions is compelling but outside the scope of this chapter (see Wittgenstein’s
Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary [Chicago, 1996], 11–15 passim.). Banfield
argues that, at least as far as Bloomsbury is concerned, Wittgenstein’s arrival in Cambridge (and
especially his work after the Tractatus) comes too late to be significant in the rethinking of subject-
object relations: “We can thus take the rise of Wittgenstein’s influence as a kind of cut-off point for the
philosophical background of Bloomsbury” (PT, 9). Later, Banfield writes that it “would not be
necessary to insist on Russell’s importance if the subsequent course of British philosophy, marked
by the influence of the later Wittgenstein and relegating Russell’s epistemology to the philosophical
past, did not minimize it” (41).
“Now, day after day, light turned,” and someone asks, “What power could
now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?” (TTL, 128, 129, 138; emphases
mine). In each case, the “now” indicates the possibility of a perspective unmoored
from a subject; the fact that these perspectives can be described means that
they in some vital way exist. They guarantee the real, and in a godless universe
that fact forces a confrontation with the limitations of the subject, with the end
of life.
All this leads, in the second half of The Phantom Table, to a rethinking of
Woolf ’s aesthetics, worked through Cambridge epistemology and Roger Fry on
Cézanne. It is here that Lily Briscoe assumes a major importance, her painting
figuring not only the opening onto a Russellian theory of the world but also, by
novel’s end, a major revision of that theory that privileges aesthetic form over
the immediate experience of sense-data. In the novel’s first section, Banfield
remarks, Lily “begins in the Impressionist manner,” facing the Ramsays’
house and painting some version of what she sees (PT, 288). Though, as she
tells William Bankes, the picture “is not of them,” that the mother and child she
paints might become instead a patch of color, the picture nonetheless depends on
the here and now of its painting, and it registers the sense-data of its moment:
Russell, more or less unreconstructed (42). But in the novel’s third section, with
Mrs. Ramsay dead and Mr. Ramsay and the others off to the lighthouse at
last, Lily paints her picture from memory. Her “solution is the ‘discovery’
in the accidental arrangement [of] a form,” says Banfield (289); as someone
comes into the drawing room, sits down, and casts “an odd-shaped triangular
shadow over the step,” Lily subordinates representational imagination to geomet-
ric figure, sense-data to structure (201). “Lily’s completed painting is a Post-
Impressionist one” (Banfield, 289).
Banfield’s conclusion is worth reviewing in full
So Mr. Ramsay’s logical philosophy, found wanting in “The Window” [the

novel’s first section], becomes the philosophical “backbone” of Woolf ’s
artist’s art. “If I were painting myself I should have to find some—rod,
shall I say—something that would stand for the conception,” Woolf
writes; “one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods
or conceptions,” she continues. Lily’s painting, unable to bring back
the living Mrs. Ramsay, attempts no “pale reflex”; it “transforms” the
vision of which she was part, uniting lighthouse and window by apply-
ing . . . the aesthetic of the central division to To the Lighthouse’s own
composition. (289)
Crucial to the composition of the picture (which doubles for Banfield, as it does
in the novel, for the compositional practice of the novel itself), is Lily’s central line,
the line Thomas Matro calls “a literal version of the ‘central line’ that Fry uses in
Vision and Design to explain his aesthetic” (PT, 286). For Banfield, Lily’s “vision”
functions not as a single viewpoint, but as a series of moments, a “vision composed
of fragments, yet ultimately achieving a strange, contingent unity—contingent on
the very having occurredness of these moments, shaped by an uncompromising
refusal to turn away from the consequences of this series of givens which constitute a
life, a history, a novel” (PT, 388). The vision is, then, not only an arrangement of
moments but also a mode of resistance. What it resists is, perhaps, what has made
Woolf’s modernism less compelling to some than that of Eliot or Pound, namely the
production of reality as a mode of (ideological, religious, sexual) desire.10 Like
Cézanne’s “eyeless vision of plastic color,” made into a figure for the age by Roger
Fry, Lily’s painting is a geometric apprehension of a collection of possible (not
necessarily human) perspectives. They are “given,” as Banfield suggests (388). But
they are not given to anyone in particular.
“Eyeless”: In The Phantom Table, the word first appears in reference to Cézanne
and post-Impressionism (258), is later opposed to “common-sense” vision (266),
at one point describes the “world of logical forms in whose net the empirical is
caught” (363), before coming to rest on the final page in the “vision of plastic
color” given by Cézanne. By then, it has become a figure for the imaginary English
painter as much as for the real French one; Lily’s eyeless vision of the central line
closes out her painting, the novel, and Banfield’s book. Lily does, of course, have
eyes, but because the quest to “describe the world seen without a self ” aims to
produce a vision unbeholden to any single subject’s vision, those eyes must, in the
aesthetic produced by the intersection of Russell and Bloomsbury, subordinate
themselves to the possibility of their own nonexistence.11
What should one make, then, of the fact that Lily’s eyes are described in the
novel, five times, as Chinese? “Lily’s picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little
Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not
take her painting very seriously” (TTL, 17); “‘And now,’ she said, thinking that
Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it
10
Banfield: “The Bloomsbury aesthetic is like other modern aesthetics in its religious reference,
although without the reference to institutionalized belief, as with Joyce or Eliot. . . . What remained of
a religion emptied of belief was the emotion” (359).
11
The world seen without a self ” is voiced by Woolf at the end of The Waves, and cited by
Banfield as the invocation for the “project of a language of sensibilia” (297).
would take a clever man to see it” (TTL, 26); “But, she thought, screwing up her
Chinese eyes . . . ” (TTL, 91); “in her little grey dress with her little puckered face
and her little Chinese eyes” (TTL, 104); “she stood screwing up her little Chinese
eyes in her small puckered face” (TTL, 157).12
This is where Patricia Laurence comes in. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes
produces an archaeology of Lily’s vision that locates its origins not in Russellian
epistemology, but in the intellectual, aesthetic, and personal contacts between
Bloomsbury and China. These range from Julian Bell’s visit to China in 1935 to a
series of relationships between figures marginal or central to Bloomsbury and
Chinese intellectuals and writers (E.M. Forster with Xiao Qian, G.L. Dickinson
and Fry with Xu Zhimo, and the sixteen-month correspondence between Woolf
and Ling Shuhua);13 they include also the general aesthetic availability of Chinese
art (the subject of essays and lectures by Fry) and Chinese kitsch (in the catalogs
of the Liberty department stores); translations of Chinese poetry by Arthur
Waley, Pound, and others; and the journalistic coverage of the Boxer Rebellion
(1895–1900) and the fall of the Qing dynasty (1911).
The circumstantial case is, then, compelling; hard to imagine that the word
“Chinese,” as Woolf applies it to Lily’s eyes in To the Lighthouse, did not signal
more than just a physical shape. For Laurence, the Chinese eyes are a synecdoche
for an entire ethos of investigation, of cross-cultural influence, and of literary
hybridity explicitly differentiated from a pernicious Orientalism:
Lily’s “Chinese eyes” suggest not the Empire’s foraging glance toward the
distant lands of China and India for trade and gain, but the new aesthetic
voyaging in the East during the modernist period. . . . Lily’s embodiment
of “Chinese eyes”—Woolf ’s brilliant cultural, political, and aesthetic
12
It is worth noting that three of these references make Mrs. Ramsay the source for the
characterization (in free indirect discourse on p. 17, direct psycho-narration on p. 26; the description
on p. 104 is also part of a long piece of free indirect discourse). The other two (on pp. 91 and 157) both
appear in sections that feature free indirect discourse through Lily herself; only in the first of the two is
Mrs. Ramsay diegetically present to focalize the observation. In part three of the novel, Lily’s eyes are
never referred to as Chinese; by then, Mrs. Ramsay is dead. The care with which the adjective
“Chinese” is distributed ought to make readers equally careful about ascribing the adjective to
Woolf or pressing too hard on its meaning. The amount of narrative and philosophic pressure put
on Lily’s eyes throughout the novel, however, makes an account of their “Chinese” character necessary.
13
Julian Bell, Woolf’s nephew, had an affair with Ling Shuhua during his time in China. The
affair is discussed extensively in Laurence’s book; it is also the subject of a novelized account by Hong
Ying, who has been sued for defamation by Ling’s descendants. For a reading of the Ling-Woolf
correspondence within the optic of Orientalism and feminism, see Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the
Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley, 2001), 215–21.
stroke—suggests . . . not only the incorporation of the Chinese aesthetic into

the ‘English’ artist, but also European modernism’s, and now, our own
questioning of our cultural and aesthetic place or “universality.” (10)14
This is, in any case, the project. As ambitious as Banfield in her attempt
to revise some of the core features of our contemporary understanding of
modernism, Laurence aims to transform a single or local modernism into
“interrupted modernisms, multiple modernisms, migratory modernisms, or an
evolving international modernism” (359).
Just as Banfield reads Lily’s central line within the context of a Russell-
influenced post-Impressionism, Laurence reads the line as an extension of
Bloomsbury’s experience of China. The Chinese, Laurence argues, “have been
preoccupied with the calligraphic line in painting for centuries” (352).15 For
Woolf, Laurence says, the Chinese emphasis on “line” (at the expense of, say,
perspectival verisimilitude) must have signified as a mark of geometric abstrac-
tion, a uniting of artistic practice (the fingers on the brush, the wrist just so) and
aesthetic form. And so, in the last lines of To the Lighthouse, as Lily has had her
vision, “the relationships,” Laurence writes, “are suddenly clear in the place-
ment of this line. Woolf ’s unwitting vocabulary of ‘rhythm,’ ‘line,’ ‘stroke,’ and
‘pause’ to describe Lily’s process and her own not only captures modernism but
also Chinese traces: the lines and strokes of the calligraphic brush that creates a
14
The distinction between Empire’s “foraging glance” and a “new aesthetic voyaging” that is
presumably less imperialist aims to absolve Woolf of the potential association with Orientalism. But to
believe that Orientalism requires an explicitly “foraging” epistemological form requires a profound
misunderstanding of the nature of Orientalism, which is a mode of writing and knowing that does not
need explicitly to imagine itself as connected to the imperial project. As an ideological form Oriental-
ism must be understood as more than simply a kind of “taking sides” for or against imperialism. It is
the cultural structure within which knowledge emerged during a specific historical period and within a
limited geographic and cultural framework (which was itself internally complex on the question of
“sides” and of cross-cultural influence).
15
Whether anyone can really say that as large a group of people as the Chinese (over centuries)
has been singly preoccupied with a single feature of the aesthetic, whether the word “line” here
manages to denote simultaneously something culturally Chinese and something culturally English,
what the terms of a “preoccupation” would be, are all important questions and go to the heart of the
longstanding debate (or “problem,” as far as the West is concerned) around the issue of (a) Chinese
aesthetic(s) (The first question being, is there one? And the second being, is there more than one?).
Comparison with a sentence like “the Europeans have been preoccupied with representational
perspective in painting for centuries” shows how Laurence’s characterization might be simultaneously
vaguely right but wrong in many of its particulars. For more on the debate around China and
aesthetics, see Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, 1993), and Zhang Longxi,
Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).
continuum from words to paintings” (LB, 387).16 The coincidences

between terms like “rhythm” and “line” and the ones writers and critics like
Fry were using to describe Chinese paintings or describe Chinese aesthetic
values suggest almost inexorably, at the end of a few hundred pages of
literary history and archival research, that something “Chinese” is happening
here.17
The difficulty of figuring out what that “Chinese” thing is, or how Chinese it
might be—even whether one ought, as some critics have suggested, to rethink the
entire apparatus of Anglo-American modernism through the Chinese lens18—
can be measured by the ease with which the words that justify Laurence’s reading
of Lily’s line appear in Banfield’s The Phantom Table as symptoms of a completely
different explanation:
The same mathematical knowledge which sustains Mrs. Ramsay under-

girds Lily’s painting, whose “pauses” and “strokes” formed a “rhythmical
movement”: “all were related”; “she scored her canvas with brown running
nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed . . . a
space.” . . . Lily’s solution—“something to the right, something to the left,
and the whole is held together”—again resembles Russell’s “observed
complex fact,” where “this patch of red is to the left of that patch of
blue.” (PT, 286; emphases mine)
In this example, the critical method, as in Laurence, depends on extensive (and

convincing) citational juxtaposition undergirded by the historical fact of physical
or literary contact; reading Woolf after Banfield, one feels quite simply that
something Russellian is happening here.
How Russellian, how Cambridge-philosophical, post-Impressionist; how Chi-

nese? At one point in Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes Laurence writes, “What the West
16
What Laurence means by “unwitting” is, I think, one of the crucial questions here: it seems to
mark the limits of her scholarship, which cannot directly prove what Woolf was thinking as she wrote
of Lily’s rhythms and pauses.
17
Woolf, Laurence notes, assigned “Chinese eyes” to at least two other people: Mrs. Dalloway’s
daughter, Elizabeth, and John Donne (LB, 346). In those cases, the “something” that happens is, it is
fair to say, less clear, probably because neither figure in Woolf’s work goes on to articulate what are
taken to be Woolf ’s own aesthetic principles and values.
18
Zhaoming Qian, for instance, makes this argument at length in Orientalism and Modernism
and elsewhere.
learns then from the Chinese ‘codes’ of perception and aesthetics is the dissolu-
tion of the boundary between the visual and verbal and the subject and the
object” (384). But what one might say in response to Laurence is that there is at
least one other major competing explanation for how Bloomsbury learns about
the “dissolution of the boundary between the visual and the verbal and the
subject and the object,” namely Banfield’s. The encounter between these two
books, Banfield’s on one hand and Laurence’s on the other, presents scholars of
Bloomsbury modernism with two quite different, and differently compelling,
derivations of modernist aesthetics.
The confrontation between these two books stages one of the more interesting
divides in contemporary scholarship on modernism, namely the one between a
philosophical, epistemological approach and a cultural, internationalist one. It is
not remarkable that The Phantom Table, for which Lily’s eyes constitute such a
major trope, makes no hay of the fact that Mrs. Ramsay describes them as
Chinese; no more remarkable, that is, than that Laurence deals only cursorily
with the entire apparatus of Cambridge philosophy, despite her interest in the
Chinese modifications of Western aesthetic subjectivity. What we’ve got here is, as
the prison boss said, a failure to communicate. The immediate solution is
presumably for more people to read both books. But the real issue has to do
with the nature of Anglo-American modernism itself, or rather the contemporary
critical sense of its nature: Is it, following Banfield, an aesthetic movement
primarily defined by a new philosophical experience of the “objects of sensation,”
a line connected most immediately in the modernist moment to figures like
Henri Bergson, the Cambridge philosophers, and the phenomenologies of
Edmund Husserl and others?19 Or is it, instead, the product of a quasi-post-
colonial shift in geopolitical experience, a turn Eastward or Southward (or inward
to Easts and Souths already present in the West) in search of modes of resistance
to industrial capitalism or a tired Romanticism, fired in the crucible of its
19
A critical tradition that ends with The Phantom Table easily includes such recent works as
Sanford Schwartz’s The Matrix of Modernism (Princeton, N.J., 1985), Jon Erickson’s The Fate of the
Object (Ann Arbor, 1995), and Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production
(Princeton, N.J., 1998). As I understand this trajectory, it differs in important ways from the recent
emphasis in literary and cultural criticism on material culture, perhaps best embodied on the literary
side by Bill Brown’s work on “things” (see for instance “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 [2001].).
Where the subject-object line depends for its weight on philosophy, work in material culture grounds
itself in the comparative lightness of the physical artifact. For a take on Chinese material culture in the
context of British modernism see Judith Green, “‘A New Orientation of Ideas’: Collecting and the Taste
for Early Chinese Ceramics in England 1921–36” in Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display,
ed. Stacey Pierson (London, 2000).
frequent recourse to translation, primitivism, and appropriation?20 There is of

course no need to decide between these two Anglo-American modernisms (or to
imagine that they are the only two available), but the limitations of what any one
person can study make it difficult for scholarship to consider modernism’s
philosophical heritage and its intercultural, translational one without privileging
one of them over the other, usually by assigning one of them a prior existence in
which the other merely intervenes.21
Lily Briscoe’s central line can in the right hands bend toward modernisms both
philosophical and Chinese. The trajectory that links Lily’s painting to the novel,
her character to Woolf ’s, her aesthetic to Fry’s, and her epistemology to modern-
ism’s, unites an enormous amount of intellectual material. Only in the assign-
ment of all that material to a single origin, the move to Cambridge or the move to
China, does the line divide, separating two modernisms and two trends in
modernist scholarship. This dilemma can be resolved not by choosing one
track over the other but by abandoning the singularly original structure that
any such choice requires.
The scholarly divide illustrated by the differences between these two books is
not simply an issue for scholars of Anglo-American literature. What is at stake is
nothing less than the question of modernism itself, of the possibility of thinking
modernism globally or internationally, without conceiving of modernism as
something that spreads across the world from a single European origin (Eliot’s
Waste Land, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joyce’s Ulysses) to a variety of other
countries, which in turn produce local modernisms defined by a combination
of their imitation of the aesthetic or philosophical principles of modernism
“proper” and the local conditions under which they appeared. Such a theory of
modernism will never be able to open itself to the possibility that modernism
20
Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes in such a context bookends a tradition whose recent work includes
Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), Michael
North’s The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York,
1994), and, in the Chinese context, the work of Robert Kern and Steven G. Yao.
21
In the American context, the epistemological and cultural explanations for modernism have an
easier time coming together, most visibly in the Harlem Renaissance or, closer to home in this context,
the Imagist movement, which explicitly marketed itself as a new mode of perception (and hence a
model for a new relation between subjects and objects), at least initially, through the examples of
Greek (in the case of H.D.) and Chinese (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell). What this suggests is that the
“modernism” Banfield and Laurence wish to revise may already be local, particular, and therefore in
some sense “international” (that is, it is British modernism at stake here, Bloomsbury modernism
most specifically); what we have may not be a problem in the scholarship of modernism but a problem
in the scholarship of modernisms.
could not only be imitated but defined by these transformations and, thus, will
remain trapped in a chauvinism that is both Eurocentric and temporally limited
(Eurocentric because temporally limited). In such a schema, the emergence of a
“Chinese” modernism (or a Japanese, Hungarian, or Latin American one) can
only be understood as the belated (and often diluted) expression of the authentic
original.
It seems to me that two possible directions will allow us to escape the trap of
mapping the great historical canard of capitalist progress (in which the rest of the
world is simply a primitive and undeveloped version of the West) onto literary
history. First, it ought to be possible to do work that suggests that at the so-called
origin of European modernism, the foreign has already inserted itself: that is, in
other words, that what has been for a long time conceived of as an aesthetic
movement whose concerns were purely European can be shown to have at its
core features that draw from other cultures. The impact of African art on
Picasso and other modernist artists is well known. Here the project is to turn
the fact of cross-cultural influence (from South to North, and East to West)
into a kind of “common sense” of modernist studies globally. Second, it ought to
be possible to reconceive a definition of modernism itself that would not
simply generalize the traits of the two or three “original” modernist texts of the
early twentieth century, but would consider the entire global cultural output
that has occurred under the name “modernism,” which would permit an under-
standing of “modernism” from a much larger historical and cultural perspective.
In such a schema, the various “other” national modernisms would find a
place not as derivative products of an origin but rather as full partners in a
literary movement that continues to evolve. It may turn out that when the great
history of modernism is written its most “central” works will not turn out to be
those of its apparent European origins but those of its strongest and most
compelling moments elsewhere; it is possible, for instance, to consider much of
the avant-garde performance and visual art being produced in China and else-
where today as an ongoing testimony to the relevance of modernist “values”
largely conceived.
The point, then, would be that all modernism is partly local, partly defined by
local characteristics and local histories. But also that the local is in turn defined
by a relation to the global—in fact you can’t know what the “local” is except
in relation to some global world that the local is not. The “local” makes itself
local through a relation to travel, trade, and cultural flow, just like the global
does; it’s simply a different relation. Everyone knows this, and yet when it
comes to modernist scholarship in Anglo-American studies, such a perspective
is too frequently forgotten, or, when it is remembered, it is remembered at the

expense of philosophy, as though cultural particularity and philosophy were
mutually exclusive. I have suggested that what divides Banfield from Laurence
is precisely this difference: that Banfield’s book cannot attend well to the cultural
and international possibilities latent in Woolf ’s work and that Laurence cannot
attend well to the philosophical ones. What is needed is a kind of double vision.
This chapter attempts to provide one, illustrating the general principles
contained in these last few paragraphs by way of an intense attention to and
close rereading of the philosophical and literary material that Banfield and
Laurence address.
2. Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes
Imagine a novel. Its hero is the philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the time the
novel is written, everyone has heard of him; with Einstein, he may be the most
famous intellectual in the world.
The novel begins in 1920, with a trip Russell makes to Russia, a trip he expects
to allow him a richer sense of the limitations of industrial capitalism; the
Bolsheviks, he feels, will offer a serious alternative to the economic and political
models of the West.
Instead, Russia turns out to be a “continually increasing nightmare.”22
In addition to a growing sense that “the average working man feels himself the
slave of the Government,” as Russell writes in a book he publishes later that year,
the trip is marred by an unpleasant, difficult boat trip down the River Volga,
during which his friend Clifford Allen becomes extremely sick.23 Russell notes the
event in his journal:
One of us lies at death’s door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and
terror and the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the
sounds of loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us
lies a great silence, strong as Death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seems
that none have leisure to hear the silence, yet it calls to me so insistently
22
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1914–1944, vol. 2 (Boston, 1968), 141.
23
Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York, 1922), 60. Further references in the text are
cited as PC.
that I grow deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the endless

information of the well-informed.24
The silence “strong as Death” that Russell hears connects him to a world
beyond politics. As he listens, called to silence by the illness of his friend and
the indifference of the loud-voiced around them, he grows “deaf ” to the Bolshe-
vik propaganda he has come to Russia to hear. A year later, Russell will write that
it “was on the Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how profound is
the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks are attempting to force
on an essentially Asiatic population, just as Japan and the West are doing in
China” (PC, 12).
Readers of this imaginary novel will begin to recognize, in the appearance of
the metaphor of “disease” in this last sentence, sustained by the reference to the
Volga, Allen’s actual sickness and the great figural silence of Death it calls forth, a
leakage between the body and the body politic, the insistent drip of a metaphor of
illness and health, in Russell’s language. Years later his biographer Ray Monk
will write: “It was as if, travelling through the vast Russian countryside on a
steamboat along the Volga, he underwent another conversion experience, another
sudden realisation, this time of the sickness of Western civilization” (BR, 581).
The metaphor of illness and disease will return throughout Russell’s descrip-
tions of China. There, in late 1920, he seems determined to resist this violence,
this disease, on behalf of the Chinese. In early letters home, he describes Eur-
opeans he sees as though they were “carriers of some deadly affliction” (BR, 593).
The ones he sees in Shanghai “almost all look villainous and ill”; in Changsha, he
says, “The Europeans have a few factories, a few banks, a few missions and a
hospital—the whole gamut of damaging and repairing body and soul by western
methods.”25 And, in a letter he pens to an American businessman, Russell
connects Western capitalism to a willful and deliberate violence and indifference
to the pain of others: “comfortable plutocrats of other countries consider every
inhabitant of a communist country deserving of death by slow torture. When
operations have to be performed, it is impossible to obtain anaesthetics, because
capitalists are of the opinion that the anguish endured is deserved by those who
24
Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London, 1996), 580. Further references in
the text are cited as BR.
25
Russell, Autobiography, 197, 199. These two citations appear together in Monk’s description
of Russell’s trip, contextualized there as here in terms of a larger metaphor of disease and illness
(BR, 592–93). Monk foregrounds that metaphor throughout his descriptions of Russell’s trips to Russia
and China, and I am grateful to him for calling my attention to it in Russell’s language and work.
threaten to make them less rich.”26 The visit to China thus takes place under the
shadow of disease and illness, metaphorical and actual.
But Russell may have found in China a cure for the those fatal afflictions: “Apart
from the influence of Europeans,” he writes, “China makes the impression of what
Europe would have become if the eighteenth century had gone on till now without
industrialism or the French revolution.”27 No industrialization, no French revo-
lution: here the facts of an other history provide—relying, of course, on the old
story of Chinese historical stasis—an “Asiatic” alternative to the “Western men-
tality” being imposed globally by Europe, Japan, and the Bolsheviks.
In the throes of this discovery, much Chinese violence can be forgiven. Writing
to a friend in February 1921, our hero says:
I have no home on this planet—China comes nearer to one than any other
place I know, because the people are not ferocious. It is true that the
soldiers occasionally run amok,28 sack a town and bayonet all who do not
instantly deliver up their whole wealth. But this is such a trivial matter
compared to what is done by “civilized” nations that it seems not to count.
20 million people are starving in the provinces near here, and the Chinese
do nothing to relieve them. But they are better than we are, because the
famine is not caused deliberately by them, whereas we deliberately cause
famines for the pleasure of gloating over dying children.29
26
Bertrand Russell, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914–1970, ed.
Nicholas Griffin, (London, 2001), 220–21.
27
Russell, Autobiography, 199.
28
The etymology of the word “amok” gives this complaint a strange twist: first found in English
as a translation of the Portuguese amouco, it originates in the Malay word amoq, meaning “engaging
furiously in battle, attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission
of indiscriminate murder . . . Applied to any animal in a state of vicious rage” (Oxford English
Dictionary, amok, a. and adv.). The term’s return East to describe Chinese soldiers offers another
example of the recursive nature of the history of Western imperialism, as the word borrowed from
Malay to describe what seemed to Westerners a particular cultural type of behavior (from the Voyages
of Captain Cook: “To run amock is to get drunk with opium . . . to sally forth from the house, kill the
person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede
his passage”) makes its way to Portuguese, then English and England, and then back to China to
describe behavior which it therefore implicitly identifies as “Asian.” The OED gives another instantia-
tion of this recursiveness, turned to quite a different cultural valence, from Thoreau’s Walden: “I might
have run ‘amok’ against society, but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me.” I first
heard about the etymology of “amok” from Paul Kramer, who spoke of it while giving a paper at
Cornell University in summer 2003. But see also Sanjay Krishnan, “Reading Globalization from the
Margin: The Case of Abdullah Munshi,” Representations 99 (Summer 2007).
29
Russell, Selected Letters, 223–24.
Readers familiar with the history of the West’s Chinese dreamers will hear in
this apologia echoes of Matteo Ricci, Edgar Snow, or Philippe Sollers. The
novelist, they will say, has done some homework.
But the story cannot go on forever like this. A few weeks after writing that
letter, our hero will become sick; feverish, delirious, he almost dies. So it is that
the metaphor of disease and illness Russell carries with him to China becomes
realized in his own body. He does not, in the middle of the illness or afterward,
following a long and strenuous recovery, recognize the irony. It nonetheless
produces a temporary change in his opinion of China. Writing to a friend in
June, he says: “This place seems cruel to Europeans. When one is robust it is full
of charm, but in bad health it is terrifying.” And his partner Dora Black, in a letter
to her mother, reports that “People here are horribly callous about relief.
They leave their neighbours severely alone, even when they are dying . . . [They]
just remain placidly indifferent” (BR, 602).
The tables, as they say, have turned. And in the last days of our hero’s
convalescence, Dora, who has cared for him all through his illness, visits her
doctor to inquire about the fact that she has missed her period. Diagnosis:
pregnancy. The child Russell has longed for will finally be his. The couple pack
their bags and head back to England. Life usurps death, the West replaces China,
the dream is over.
But we are not quite done with the story; or rather, there is an afterword.30
At home, Russell writes a book, The Problem of China. It is full of praise for
Chinese history, its culture, its intellectual integrity. “[O]n the balance, I think the
30
Things are even more complicated in fact than in my imaginary novel. In late March, having
gotten wind of Russell’s illness, a newspaper in Japan reported that he had died. The news spread
quickly around the world, producing emotional reactions ranging from sadness to disbelief; on
the latter front Monk reports that Russell’s brother Frank told English journalists that “dying in
Peking . . . was not the sort of thing his brother would do without letting him know” (600). One
missionary paper, remembering Russell’s vitriolic critiques of organized religion, noted the event with
a single sentence: “Missionaries may be pardoned for heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Mr.
Bertrand Russell’s death,” an anecdote Russell recounts with some pleasure in his Autobiography: “I
fear they would have heaved a sigh of a different sort when they found that I was not dead after all”
(vol. 2, 189). Indeed, he seems to have gotten a great deal of pleasure from the misunderstanding. In a
letter to Ottoline Morrell in May, he wrote:
“I have realized one ambition which I almost despaired of, I have read an obituary notice of
myself. In Japan I was reported dead, and the Japan Chronicle had a long article on me. My
illness has not changed me in the slightest, in fact it has made hardly more impression than
a bad toothache. I have missed much by not dying here, as the Chinese were going to have
given me a terrific funeral in Central Park, and then buried me in an island in the Western
Chinese one of the best nations I have come across, and am prepared to draw up
a graver indictment against every one of the great powers” (220). Nonetheless
its author will with reluctance offer a list of three Chinese “defects”: avarice,
cowardice, and callousness.31
On the subject of callousness, Russell has this to say: “Famines in China can be
permanently cured only by better methods of agriculture combined with emigra-
tion or birth-control on a large scale. Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes
them indifferent to efforts to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of
Chinese callousness has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the
vastness of the problems involved” (221–22). So far so good; echoes of the letter
from February 1921. The text continues:
But there remains a residue which cannot be so explained. If a dog is run

over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passers-by will
stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. The spectacle of suffering does not
of itself rouse any sympathetic pain in the average Chinaman; in fact, he
seems to find it mildly agreeable.32 Their history, and their penal code
before the revolution of 1911, show that they are by no means destitute of
the impulse of active cruelty; but of this I did not myself come across any
instances. And it must be said that active cruelty is practised by all the great
nations, to an extent concealed from us only by our hypocrisy. (221–22)
It is important to understand the context within which Russell locates the

“residue” of Chinese callousness. On the one side, he attributes as much as
possible of what might appear to Westerners to be callousness to the distribution
of arable land and population; the indifference of the Chinese intelligentsia to
structural famine, he argues, must be grasped as a function of an inability to solve
Lake, where the greatest poets and emperors lived, died, and were buried. Probably I should
have become a God. What an opportunity missed!”
(Selected Letters, 226).

31
The request for such a list comes, crucially, from an “eminent Chinese writer.” As Lydia Liu has
suggested, the narration of this fact consolidates “the author’s own knowledge about the other even as
the subjectivity of the anonymous other is consumed in the process of appropriation” (Translingual
Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity in China, 1900–1937 [Stanford, 1995],
46.). Liu follows this observation with an extensive discussion of the history of Russell’s Problem of
China as it was received in China. Shu-mei Shih also discusses this moment in Russell in The Lure of
the Modern (23–24).
32
Interesting to consider this in light of the American missionary’s reaction to reports of Russell’s
death, which the missionary seems to have found mildly agreeable (see n.30).
the problems that underlie it. And on the other side, Russell distinguishes this
“residue” from the “active cruelty” that he locates broadly in Chinese “history”
and more narrowly in the Chinese penal code prior to 1911, both forms of cruelty
Russell acknowledges to be practiced by all nations in any case. The particular
experience of the relation between China and pain comes, then, not from a
description of torture, violence, or structural indifference, each of which Russell
excuses or excises from consideration. The residue, he writes, “cannot be . . .
explained”: the average Chinese person finds the spectacle of suffering mildly
agreeable.
Faced with a set of cultural differences—an apparent indifference to famine, a
penal code invested in judicial torture—Russell places them within a framework
that allows them to be understood as contingent rather than genetic, as functions
of particular circumstances rather than expressions of some deep-set Chinese
national character (in the first case, geographic ones, in the second, the general
tendency of nation-states toward “active cruelty”). Though the Chinese react this
way to famine, though they have been actively cruel, these facts do not themselves
justify an argument for Chinese callousness. English readers should understand
them instead as expected responses to a set of historical facts. Other human
beings, other great nations, would in the same situation believe roughly what the
Chinese do, behave roughly as they behave. But the residue “that cannot be so
explained” remains outside the economy of historical causality.
In the imaginary novel, Russell’s claim regarding the failure of the “spectacle of
suffering” to rouse in Chinese people any “sympathetic pain” echoes Dora’s
complaint that people “remain placidly indifferent” to their neighbors’ suffering,
each claim caught up in a network of associations that revolve around the presence
of disease, illness, and indifference to pain (“whereas we deliberately cause famines
for the pleasure of gloating over dying children”). A reading of this narrative as
narrative rather than as history foregrounds the presence of illness and pain as
figures, allowing for an appreciation of the text’s high-wire structuralism, the
mode whereby it organizes its categories, reverses them, moves them from nation
to body, body to nation, East to West, and back again. The novel, one might say,
not only represents the Western experience of China as a site of resistance to
modernity, but also the degree to which any individual experience of that Chinese
dream will inevitably—and perhaps always at the moment when it is most invested
in its own “fairness” and most on the “side” of China itself—take up and work
through the history of a Western-imagined “China” and the topos of an Oriental-
ism whose broad outlines have become visible since the late 1970s.
That Russell manages to explain so much about Chinese torture and indiffer-
ence so rationally marks him as a far more culturally sensitive reader of
China than many of his predecessors, even as his discovery of the limits of his
explanations on the grounds of a low-grade sadism (“he seems to find it mildly
agreeable”) repeats an all-too-familiar cliché. But, in an imaginary novel, the
cliché proves itself to be simultaneously individually discovered and narratively
predictable, so that Russell comes to his story about the dog in the street not only
as the latest Westerner to remark this Chinese indifference to the pain of others,
but also as a character whose friend fell ill on the Volga, who almost died in
Beijing, whose partner in the dawn after a dark hour finds in her own body a
surprising, fecund germination. Though his relation to China exemplifies once
again the structure of Orientalism that exceeds Russell and is in some sense
indifferent to him, it also belongs uniquely to Russell, to the vagaries of his
letters, his body, his political essays; in short, to his person.
That pairing—the historical relationship to China on the one hand, the
personal one on the other—comes in an imaginary novel on Russell and China
to take the place of a biographical conclusion that might have to choose between
them: rather than forcing a decision that, say, that Russell is just another
Orientalist, or that he isn’t, here the novel produces instead a sense both of
the inevitability of Russell’s position and of the astonishing coincidences neces-
sary to produce it.
If I have been reading Russell’s life as a novel, then, it is because the word
“novel” allows for a reading of coincidence and figure that in “real life” will
inevitably seem outlandish, extravagant, precisely because it could have, in real
life, happened another way, or because the details chosen to make the story must
proceed by excluding the many other details that do not fit. That’s why one
person can generate any number of biographies, whereas a character is generated
by the story even as it appears to generate it: Vronsky’s horse breaks its back not
because it has a weak spine but because the story needs the back to break.33
Whereas Russell gets sick in Beijing, but he could have, we think, just as easily
stayed well. The advantage of reading the experience novelistically, with all the
33
Woolf, reviewing a biography of Christina Rossetti:
“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have
to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures—for they
are rather under life size—will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall
arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when
they were alive that they go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their
small distortions that requires, is that it turns coincidence into inevitability, and
thus permits a reading of what were probably in the experiential moments a series
of disconnected and jumbled facts as something more like a story. And the
advantage of that, in turn, is that it allows one to produce around the body
of Russell not simply a particular representation of Chinese indifference—the
moment when Russell decides to explain the residual callousness that counts as
one of the faults of the Chinese—but rather a narrative in which the character
named “Russell” finds itself implicated not simply as a neutral observer (that is, as
a public intellectual making a set of political claims about geopolitical China) but
also as a body, as a trajectory, as a narratological object: What if, I am asking,
the coincidences of Russell’s life come to tell a story—a story unobserved by
anyone—that figures not simply a moment in the history of the Western percep-
tion of Chinese indifference but also, in philosophical terms, a relationship to the
history of a particular English modernism?
3. Pain and Cambridge Philosophy
Russell’s observation about Chinese indifference is a classic example of its genre,

and it should be understood as an instance of the general historical line this book
has traced so far. It also belongs to the relatively more local genre of books on the
Chinese character exemplified by Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics. Just like
Smith’s book, Russell’s The Problem of China found itself rapidly translated and
reprinted in China by scholars attempting to think the relation between national
character and modernity. Russell’s chapter on the Chinese character appeared in
the Dongfang zazhi [Eastern miscellany] in 1922, and Lydia Liu cites a note from
its translator Yuzhi, who wrote that “the question of the Chinese guomin xing
[national character] is one that fascinates us more than anything else.”34 The
implications of the debate on national character for Chinese intellectuals’ rela-
tions to modernism and modernity, brilliantly elaborated by Liu, remain outside
the scope of the chapter, but I refer to them here to note that the Anglo-American
sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were
alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a
biography all is different.”
(cited in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf [New York, 1999], 8–9).

34
Liu, Translingual Practice, 47.
context is only one of the many situations in which Russell’s work must be
thought, and that, as for “modernism” itself, it is by no means decided in advance
that the Anglo-American context must be considered the “original” or primary
context within which Russell’s trip to China generates its theoretical and histori-
cal meaning.35
Within this general context, however, it is possible to further refine the
discussion of pain so as to make explicit and direct the connection between
Russell’s observations on the Chinese character and the philosophical work on
subjects and objects that became such a crucial feature of Bloomsbury modern-
ism. And here it turns out that pain’s relation to subjectivity is a major theme in
the work of Russell’s student, Wittgenstein, whose revisions and rejections of
Russell’s theories of subject and object biographers have made responsible
for Russell’s turn away from philosophy (this already in the mid-1910s) and
toward politics, a turn that would lead directly to the trips to Russia and China.
“Only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise
it,” Wittgenstein would write.36 He meant that pain is a private fact: I can assert
my pain to another, groan more or less convincingly, exhibit a wound that would
cause most people pain, but none of these guarantees my pain in any public
realm. To move pain into language, to speak of pain, is already to cross the
boundary between my individual consciousness and the world, to assert inside a
particular set of public rules the fact of my own experience.
Wittgenstein introduces “pain” as he ponders the relation between language
and reference:
How do words refer to sensations?—There doesn’t seem to be any problem

here; don’t we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But
how is the connexion between the name and the thing named set up? This
35
David Der-Wei Wang’s work on the relationship between violence, history, and representation
in twentieth-century Chinese fiction, for instance, adumbrates an entire dimension of the experience
and representation of violence that opens up the question of the moral and historical dimensions in
the Chinese context of such apparently “universal” features of literary language as “realism” and aporia
(see the discussion of Shen Congwen on 25–27). As Wang points out in the introduction, even
apparently universal paradigms for the relationship between violence and representation in Western
criticism borrow extensively from the “local” histories within which they occur (as for instance
Adorno on the Holocaust; see 4–5) (Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional
Writing in Twentieth-Century China [Berkeley, 2004].).
36
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 3d ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, 2001),
}246. Citations from Philosophical Investigations refer to the passage number, not a page number,
and appear in the text as PI.
question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the
names of sensations?—of the word “pain” for example. Here is one
possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expres-
sions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and
he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later,
sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.
“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?”—On the
contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not
describe it. (PI, }244)
Wittgenstein describes the relation between language and pain as neither exactly
denotative (the word “pain” does not “point” in any clear way to pain) nor precisely
nominative (“pain” is not simply a conventional sound for “the experience of
pain”).37 If the verbal expression of pain “replaces” crying, as Wittgenstein argues,
it is because “pain” neither names the experience of pain nor points to it, but rather
means, effectively, “what I mean when I cry.” Sensation as such remains private, and
only becomes speakable—but never as itself—upon entry into language. Wittgen-
stein: “The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person
possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have
this or something else” (}272). “Pain” cannot be said to describe or to mean; it is,
rather, used: “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language” (}383).
Russell’s story of the dog in the street is a story about pain, about the
recognition and expression of pain, and about reactions to that recognition.
Inasmuch as it responds to pain, the story is an artifact of the type described by
Elaine Scarry, a verbal or material object that manifests the experience of pain, or
attempts to make the inanimate structure of the planet responsive to the human
condition of pain. As Scarry writes: “A material or verbal artefact is not an alive,
sentient, percipient creature, and thus can neither itself experience discomfort
nor recognize discomfort in others. But though it cannot be sentiently aware of
pain, it is in the essential fact of itself the objectification of that awareness; itself
incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure, is the structure of a
perception.”38 The structure of a perception: in the same way that a bandage
objectifies—makes into an object—a subjectless perception of wounds and
37
Later in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “So it may look as if what we were
doing were Nominalism. Nominalists make the mistake of interpreting all words as names, and so of
not really describing their use, but only, so to speak, giving a paper draft on such a description” (}383).
38
Scarry, 289.
wounding, a story that tells of pain objectifies, puts into the ink on the page its
own acknowledgment of the state of pain it perceives, or even, as seems to be the
case with Russell, the presence of a sympathetic pain that reacts to the fact of the
pain it observes.
If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt, nine out of ten passers-
by will stop to laugh at the poor brute’s howls. Considered in the terms of a
Russellian theory of sensibilia, the scene presents four possible “subjective” perspec-
tives: that of the dog, that of the passers-by who laugh, of the single passer-by who
doesn’t, and of its observer. Only one of these might be said, in this narrative, to be
properly “occupied”: the observer, who hears the dog’s howls, sees the passers-by
and their reactions, and frames these within a syntax that makes the former the
cause of the latter, reads howling as pain and laughter as pleasure (“he seems to find
it mildly agreeable”). The method of narration is uncomplicatedly realist, episte-
mologically sure-footed. One feels a long way from Lily’s portrait from memory,
from the post-Impressionist privileging of geometry over representation, from the
eyeless possibilities of an encounter with something like the subject’s future death.
Considered in terms of its perception of pain, however, the story acquires a
more complex geometry. Draw a line from the dog to the laughing passers-by, to
indicate their relation, and another from the passers-by to the observer, because
their laughter is effectively what he reports on. Another line must go from the dog
to the observer, as it is his being touched by the “brute’s howls” that produces his
evaluation of the dog’s pain. And modify that line, in turn, by the line that
connects the dog to the passers-by, because the whole reason for telling this story
lies in perceived difference between the Chinese reaction and the Western one,
between the two different attitudes toward the fact of the dog’s pain. What the
observer observes, in this sense, includes the dog’s pain, the Chinese reaction to
that pain, his own reaction to that pain, and the difference between them, which
makes the fact of the reaction visible as such. The observer occupies, then,
not one but two perspectives, one in the immediate moment of a visceral
experience and the other in a more evaluative (later?) experience that includes
the initial experience of the scene. One more line, then, between the observer
of the first perspective and the one of the second. This is not so much eyelessness
as the multiplication of eyes, a slow but surefooted generation of modernism
inside the realistic, and an arrangement of perspectives that contrasts
obscure forms of oral signification—laughter, howling—with the epistemological
surefootedness of an observer who thinks he knows exactly what he sees. This
assuredness renders the observer narratologically invisible, or permits him to
imagine himself as such. (The narrator “adds nothing,” Lacan remarks; and
Derrida replies: “As if one had to add something to intervene in a scene.”39)

Whatever visibility remains will be clearest to readers of the imaginary novel: the
narrative of Chinese indifference recapitulates and allegorizes Russell’s personal
experience in China, his own sense of its “cruelty.” What the observer sees
without knowing it is the possibility of his own meaningless suffering and
death.40
The story of the dog on the street thus reproduces and anticipates both the basic
questions of Cambridge philosophy in the modernist period and some of its major
tropes: the occupation of perspectives, a more general telemetry of vision and
experience, to be sure, but also the sense of “pain” as a particularly fertile site for
the investigation of relations between subjects, the relationship between language
and humanity, and so forth. That all this happens in a Chinese context, within the
frame of an explicit attempt to experience and narrate large-scale cultural differ-
ence (remember Russell’s initial motivations for going to China, his sense that it
could offer civilizational resistance to Western industrialism) allows the question
of subjects, objects, and the nature of human reality to take a final turn. Because if
“pity . . . is a form of conviction that someone else is in pain,” and “pain” itself
depends on a human entry into language (both these ideas from Wittgenstein,
produced as part of a lifelong supercession of Russell’s own arguments about
sensibilia), then indifference or laughter in relation to the pain of others indicates
a failure to recognize those others as human. That is, the Chinese do not recognize
Russell in his illness in the way in which he recognizes himself; they do not
recognize the dog in the way in which Russell recognizes the dog: as subjects.
The story of the dog thus at first appears to be largely cultural: Russell seems
to be explaining to a British audience the difference between “us” and the
Chinese, a difference he defines as residual to rational explanation and elaborates
39
Jacques Derrida, La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris, 1980), 457.
40
To put a slightly finer point on this, and to locate its philosophical force once again in the
precise material context with which I am dealing here, consider the following narrative, which appears
in Marc Riboud’s The Three Banners of China (New York, 1966):
“One day I was walking in Liu Li-chang, a mean street in the old quarter of Peking which is
always crowded. A man of over fifty, no doubt a worker, was returning home on his ancient
bicycle. He was pedalling [sic] slowly and with difficulty. All of a sudden his front fork
broke and he fell face down on the road. The men and women walking along this narrow
street neither turned back nor stopped; they simply moved to avoid him. Nobody helped
the old man. He got up on his own, his mouth covered with blood. Such indifference was
the hallmark of the old China. If there had been a youngster there, perhaps he would have
followed the example of Lei Feng, learned at school. Perhaps not.” (135)
with an example. But for Russell, as for Wittgenstein and as for moral philoso-
phers like Adam Smith, indifference to pain is not just a randomly chosen
example of human behavior, but, rather, a central fact of what makes human
beings human. What looks like a simple story about cultural difference turns out,
seen from this angle, to depend on a complex network of recognitions and failed
recognitions, each of which goes to the heart of whether Chinese callousness can
in the end define the Chinese as inhuman(e), and on a epistemological history
whose privileged trope makes this particular example especially telling. The
primacy of pain and pity to the modern conception of self and subject makes
the encounter with a different relation to pain still inside the scope of the human
effectively unimaginable: indifference to pain is not subject to negotiation. That
feeling depends not just on epistemology, not just on culture: it requires both.
In Banfield’s reading of To the Lighthouse, the encounter with indifference

indicates time, not culture.41 It is not just that the things are indifferent to people,
but also the reverse; lost in attics or libraries, buried and misremembered, hidden,
forgotten, the things and the people go on with their lives as behind them a
mountain of people and things gather themselves briefly together in the arms of
the angel of history, then disappear under clouds of newer debris. Russell, attempt-
ing to explain why we think the table we saw yesterday is the same table we see today,
calls the joining together of multiple possible temporal perspectives a “biography.”42
Though the word conjures life, the table’s biography—like the person’s—is a “life”
constituted not in the presence of a metaphysical subject but merely in the
presence of possible observation: like sensibilia, biographies do not have to be
observed to exist. “The result,” Banfield says, “is not so much a loss of reality, but
a redefinition of it that only increases the conviction of its mind-independence”
(PT, 101). And in this mind-independence, the individual biography, the life of a
person or a thing, matters little in comparison to the vast indifference of time,
the multiplicity of perspectives from which any one, any one thing, is not, cannot, or
never will be seen, located, and differentiated: from which its pain will never
produce a recognition. It is the ill, lying recumbent, Woolf once wrote, “who
41
Ramsay “learns not a moral lesson but a law of time, the self’s inevitable end amidst the
indifference of things.” The “self ” Banfield refers to is large, and includes not only the human subject
but also the work of art and the work of philosophy (PT, 351).
42
Banfield writes: “Presumably the public table itself would have a biography, since it persists
over time, just as the person, Scott or Bismarck, would be a ‘public neutral object’ with spatial
continuity, known by description” (100).
know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will
conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves
about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.”43
Nature’s indifference, like the universe’s, refers humanity to the “big” death of
galactic time. Russell’s meeting with indifference in China is an encounter with
the “little” death of life times, the famines and the soldiers running amok and his
own illness, but all of this crucially mediated through a sense that this indifference
depends on culture, not ontology. The indifference Black and Russell report
experiencing—an indifference marked by the failures of others to see them as
they would like to have been seen, to occupy the points of view from which their
suffering would have mattered—is not universal. It is “Chinese.” Insofar as the
recognition of someone’s pain can, in an indifferent world, mark a moment of
perception—insofar as the material artifact, a table or a chair, reflects the
“structure of a perception” of pain that outlasts the moment of perception (and
is in the long run completely indifferent to the particularity of it)—the moment
of what Wittgenstein calls “pity” reflects a brushing against death, large or small,
an awareness of time’s indifference. But also a willingness to remark that indif-
ference, to heal its wound, to produce something like a publicly available testa-
ment to the perception of indifference and pain. At least, let us say, in the modern:
if the Chinese seem to Russell indifferent to the pain of others, it is perhaps
because of a different kind of eyelessness, one that even in the occupation of a
perspective that can see pain remains indifferent to it (or finds it “slightly
agreeable”). This too is cultural; I say so not to condemn Russell for his limita-
tions but because those limitations define the rules of the language game whereby
indifference, pain, and China can come to metonymize modernism.
I am talking about the structure of a perception.
4. The Chineseness of Suffering
In 1926, some five years after Russell’s trip, a year before To the Lighthouse,
Virginia Woolf published in the New Criterion an essay titled “On Being Ill.” In
illness, she writes, the “make-believe” of ordinary intercourse comes to a halt.
43
VirginiaWoolf, “On Being Ill,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNellie
(London, 1994), 322. Jean-François Lyotard makes the fact of the sun’s eventual fade the signature
ground of human reality in the contemporary world in his introduction to The Inhuman: Reflections
on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (New York, 1993).
Though while healthy we serve in “the army of the upright,” joined in the great
human struggle to move forward, holding hands, to improve and to share, to
cultivate and teach, in illness “we go alone.” “That illusion of a world so shaped
that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs
and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your
experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own
mind someone has been there before you—is all an illusion. We do not know our
own souls, let alone the souls of others.”44
The byways of the self ’s “virgin forest,” though offering little consolation as
regards an incipient human loneliness, nonetheless have some advantages. In
illness, Woolf writes, no one can sustain the attention required by history or
narrative fiction. But a line or two of poetry, broken off in the name of other
tastes, “sudden, fitful, intense,” can lead to an unexpected blooming:
In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond

their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a
sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing
words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to
evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor
the reason explain. . . . Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us
at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know the sound of Antony and
Cleopatra better than we do.45
Hearing sounds divorced from sense, as though prior, then, to language, the
ill become, like Lily Briscoe, modernists, singing earless lines in the houses of
the mind. Relative to an “us”—and only relative to us, though the choice of
example matters—the Chinese (all foreigners) are in a state of permanent illness;
the dumbshow of an English Shakespeare speaks to them of unoccupied perspec-
tives, of a world without subjects, without language, in which sounds register
merely on some autochthonic recording machine. Or, in reverse: illness makes
“us” Chinese, the self-estrangement it provides akin to a geographic displace-
ment, an interior foreignness that grants a privileged awareness of the properties
of linguistic form (and, thus, to the classic structure of modernist aesthetics).
Language’s foreignness—a howl, a bark of laughter, or the bar-bar of a foreign
tongue—enters the body like a poison, or an angel, through the ear.
44
Woolf, “On Being Ill,” 320–21.
45
Woolf, “On Being Ill,” 324–25.
Is this coincidence—yet another conjunction of the Chinese, pain, the unoc-

cupied perspective of an inhuman episteme, and a fairly standard modernist
aesthetic of estrangement, each of these intertwined enough with the others to
make untangling quixotic—just a coincidence?46 I wish to end this chapter by
suggesting that the answer to that question is no, that this series of conjunctions
and coincidences, this improbable network of metonymic connections between
China, philosophy, humanity, illness, and pain, means something beyond the
fiction I have proposed. This is what the word “overdetermination” is for: to
allow us to see how biographical action can be the effect of an ideological
discourse, despite the best individual will of its participants.
What this discourse tells us about modernism is that any attempt to simply
compare modernisms from two or more national locations will fail if it does not
understand that every philosophical and literary modernism is itself subject to an
internal, undermining comparative action, in which the “foreign” always and in
advance inhabits the “native” national paradigm. The story I have told about
Russell intends to suggest that his relation to China was not simply an external
feature of the history of Orientalism, nor simply that his experience of China and
Chinese pain were shaped by his relation to philosophy, but rather that the
categories through which Russell thought—the categories that allowed him to
ask the fundamental philosophical questions of perception, of language, and of
the nature of the human—were themselves already affected by some relation to
Chineseness. That the relation to Chineseness was itself equally affected, and in
advance, by the philosophical categories that it helped shape I take as the
paradoxical but necessary corollary to this first idea.47
46
On at least one other occasion, Woolf connects China to bodies and pain. In an essay called
“The Chinese Shoe,” written in memory of Lady Henry Somerset, she laments the degree to which the
“natural desire” of Somerset’s “lively and courageous nature” was stunted by those around her, “until
we feel that the old Chinese custom of fitting the foot to the shoe was charitable compared with the
mid-Victorian practice of fitting the woman to the system” (“The Chinese Shoe,” in The Essays of
Virginia Woolf vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie [London, 1994], 390.).
47
I have left aside here two references to Elizabeth’s “Chinese eyes” in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and
one to her “oriental bearing” (Mrs. Dalloway [San Diego, 1981], 123, 135, 131), as well as to a moment in
that novel in which China becomes the measure of the nearly immeasurable boundaries of the British
imperium: “when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single
instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could
register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in
all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag;
of Empire” (18). For an analysis of this passage, see Christopher Bush’s Ideographic Modernism
(Forthcoming 2011).
I am not arguing, therefore, that Russell’s thought was originally or essentially

“Chinese.” That some aspect of his thought included China is, it seems to me,
simply true, and was generally true for anyone living in England during that era.
The difficulty comes in moving from a claim about “China” as a feature of the
cultural and individual experience of the Bloomsbury group to one that says, as
Laurence does, that without China Bloomsbury would be unthinkable. Banfield’s
work demonstrates the incompleteness of such a story. The problem is not with
Laurence’s work as such—or rather not with the particular claims she or Banfield
make for the importance of the issues they discuss to the ferment of modernism.
The problem is that the bar for relevance has been set too high, encouraging
scholars to turn complex historical claims about literary form (because moder-
nists thought about China sometimes, the modernism they created owes some-
thing to China) into simple but impossible causal ones (without China modernists
would not have thought of modernism at all). Given that the latter claim will not
convince anyone, what results is a critical world in which competing claims from
“outside” the standard cultural context that organizes literary critical work (usu-
ally the nation-state; sometimes a continent or region) can never acquire the
critical force of those claims that emerge from “inside” the standard context,
because the totalities of the latter will never overturn the totalities of the former.
It isn’t that they should; it’s that they can’t, and that expecting them to is one of the
ways in which Anglo-American modernist studies implicitly justifies its mono-
culturalism and monolingualism. The genius of Said’s Orientalism was to make
visible the degree to which the apparent “outside” had been “inside” for a very long
time: he did not simply reverse the origins, relocating them from West to East; he
undermined the whole structure of Europe’s sovereign originality.
Perhaps Lily’s line—like the lines of the two approaches to modernism cap-
tured in The Phantom Table and Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes—ought to be consid-
ered outside the parameters of Euclidean geometry. If, as Banfield argues, the line
moves past realistic representation into modernist formality, if it hints at per-
spectives unoccupied by human eyes, then there is no reason for it to obey the
Newtonian conveniences of everyday life. It might be said, then, not so much to
bifurcate (which gives us, once again, two approaches) as to stretch, to allow
parallels to cross, to bend according to historically and geographically local
centers of gravity. Following such a line, we would not study—to put the question
into its most traditional formulation—the “encounter” between Orientalism and
modernism, but rather work the interpenetration of those two categories prior to
a generalized awareness of them as categories, understanding that each of them
depends, in some way, on the apprehension of the other in advance, just as the
West’s philosophical fascination with pain lays the groundwork for Russell’s
personal encounter with China, and the reverse. There are no single origins.
A scholarship that pursued such a course would be able to affirm that formal line
in all its remarkable complexity: Lily Briscoe’s Chinese yes. But don’t lay down
those brushes yet.
5. The Hypothetical Mandarin (Reprise)
In Everybody’s Autobiography, written shortly after her return to Europe from

her American tour, Gertrude Stein remarked that many people had thought
it was funny when, in her opera Four Saints in Three Acts, “they asked Saint Therese
what would she do if by touching a button she could kill three thousand Chinamen
and the chorus said Saint Therese not interested.” But Saint Therese was interested
in building convents, not killing Chinese people, Stein writes; the hypothetical had
nothing to do with the kinds of concrete practicalities with which Saint Therese
concerned herself. Stein goes on to recall the first time she heard the hypothetical of
the Chinese mandarin from the philosopher Hutchins Hapgood. Hapgood “liked to
think of the number of angels on the point of a needle . . . and . . . always complained
of me that I had too good a time for anybody who was so virtuous.” One day,
frustrated by Stein’s “virtue,” Hapgood asked her a “test question. Would I if I could
by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother
from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine
his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not
imagine and so it was not interesting.”48
In Stein’s resistance to the idealized stupidity of the dilemma appears the
possibility of a response to the figuration of Chinese people as objects in a “test
question” for European virtue which, by saying neither yes nor no, refuses the
premise of the hypothetical as hypothetical. Such a refusal speaks most immedi-
ately to Stein’s pragmatic commitment to things over ideas, and to the hard-
48
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York, 1971), 89–90. Four Saints in Three Acts
was first staged on Broadway in February 1934, shortly before Stein set off on her book tour and only a
year before the Lohmann-Winternitz exchange at Yale. The difference between Saint Therese’s line, in
which she is not interested in killing Chinese because she has better things to do, and Stein’s, in which
she is not interested because she cannot imagine “five thousand Chinamen,” once again shows how the
relation to the hypothetical opens always in two directions: the first toward an economy of costs
(including opportunity costs), the second inside an economy of representation (including the transfer
between reference and the sympathetic imagination).
edged, pellucid qualities of her thought. But, it also suggests how the generally
recognized modernist investment in China elaborated in so much recent scholar-
ly work might be directly connected to the hypothetical mandarin that figures the
larger ambitions of this book.
The seemingly coincidental reappearance of the mandarin in Stein’s prose, the
ease with which the dean of Yale’s medical school could imagine her writing as
“Chinese,” indicates, finally, how seriously one might take Russell’s casual repro-
duction of the stereotype of Chinese indifference to the suffering of others.
Here, as elsewhere, the evidentiary relationship between that reproduction and
Russell’s philosophical impact on Woolf ’s modernism generates the problem of
the example-effect, which has to do not so much with the “failure” of China or
Chineseness to assert themselves at the “heart” or “core” of philosophy, but rather
with the ways in which China’s appearance in and around philosophical cores
(whether of modernism or of human rights) functions as a kind of disappearing
appearance. What difference, then, made to the nexus of sensibilia and modern-
ism by Lily’s “Chinese eyes,” and what difference to that nexus that Russell’s take
on Chinese defects reproduces so exactly the stereotype of George Henry Mason’s
1801 book on Chinese punishments? Let us simply say that if China could be
named a “problem” by one of the world’s two foremost intellectuals in 1922,
then the geopolitical status of China, its relation to Japanese colonialism, to
modernization, the possibility it might give “to mankind . . . a whole new hope
in the moment of greatest need,” all spoken of in Russell’s book, must be thought
of as one substrate of the world-perception that simultaneously generated the
perception of Chinese indifference and the “Chinese” logics of modernist form
(PC, 252). This chapter has shown how closely the “problem” of China cleaves to
the eyeless, earless world without subjects—the world of sensibilia generated but
unperceived—that was Russell’s main contribution to Woolf ’s modernism. If the
specter of a total global indifference to human meaning can be bound to the
particular indifference of nine out of ten Chinese to the suffering of a crushed
dog, it is only because the Wittgensteinian language game in which they both
participate relies so heavily, and still so lightly, on the appearance of China in it.
Because it is precisely in the transaction between the heaviness of the history of
philosophy or literary form and the lightness of the example that the Chinese
referent both acquires and loses its critical legitimacy, a Wittgensteinian reminder
of the importance of the rules of language games is a useful place to end this
chapter: it suggests that the major project of this book will have been to describe
the grammar, or metagrammar, that allows “China” to perform the philosophical
and referential function that becomes it.
6 Ideologies of the Anesthetic:
Acupuncture, Photography, and the Material Image
In order to take the first portraits (around 1840) the subject had to assume long poses under a
glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as a surgical
operation.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Suppose the image was not . . . merely an emphatic expression of language’s desire to draw
closer to the natural object, but a visible and material entity, a representation in a physical
medium like stone or human flesh?
—W.J.T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things,” Critical Inquiry 28
(Autumn 2001).
The semibiographical, semipolitical essays that make up Pearl S. Buck’s 1972 China
Past and Present are punctuated by some forty black-and-white photographs. Buck
and her family had left China in 1934; the photographs show a contemporary China
that she had never seen personally. In the years since her depature, Buck had become
the West’s foremost interpreter of China, thanks to the success of her many books,
fiction and nonfiction (most famously The Good Earth [1931]), and her charitable
interventions on its behalf. But by the early 1970s, her relation with China was
strained. Denied an entry visa by the Canadian embassy of the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) shortly before the publication of China Past and Present, Buck, aged
79, wrote the text knowing that it was unlikely that she would ever return to the
country she loved so much, and that the only access she would have to China or the
207
Chinese would come through the kinds of photographs and traveler’s reports she
reproduced and cited in the text.1
China Past and Present is therefore as much an exercise in reading photo-
graphic images as it is a memoir of the nation and people Buck knew, an attempt
to discern through the photographic surface the historical fate of Buck’s child-
hood home. In this caption to a René Burri photograph of a parade in Tiananmen
Square, Buck pursues that ambition with a utopian intensity:
Sometimes these parades are military, but on this day it was not, I am glad
to say, for it gives us a chance to see the faces of the people. I have studied
them as closely as I can, even under a magnifying glass, trying to fathom
the difference in these faces and the faces of the Chinese I used to know.
There are differences. I do not see old faces here. They are handsome faces,
but they do not seem happy faces. At least the crowd is well clothed and
well fed. Perhaps, after all, that is enough. Perhaps it is even happiness
nowadays. (CPP, 94)
Perhaps it is enough that the crowd is fed; perhaps the nature of happiness has
changed. As Buck pores over the faces with the magnifying glass, the answers she
seeks seem to dissipate before her. The glass has allowed the eye to range across
the image-grain, but there is no way in to the photograph, no “fathom[ing]” of a
historical difference, no vertiginous plunge into certainty. Whatever interpreta-
tion the magnifier admits through its lens threatens its own dissolution; the
photographic screen, a metonymy of the faces that Buck attempts to read,
indicates the possibility of depth but does not provide it. What’s left is longing,
a super-facial flatness in which China’s final certainties are withheld, or held, in
the form of an invocation, a prayer to the missing and beloved real—“alas, my
beloved land, China!,” she writes elsewhere (160)—whose absent presence is
articulated in the photographs as both theme and form.
Buck’s caption to Burri’s photograph will recall George Mason’s interpretive
struggles with Pu Qua’s images of Chinese workers and punishments. Something
of the two-step between caption and image that gave Mason’s The Punishments of
1
Pearl S. Buck, China Past and Present (New York, 1971). Further references in the text are cited as
CPP. The letter from the People’s Republic of China embassy reads in part: “In view of the fact that for
a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the
people of new China and their leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we can not accept your
request for a visit to China” (171).
IDEOLOGIES OF THE ANESTHETIC 209
China such an interesting, tense relation to its status as a reference book appears
here, reminding us that the self-evidence of the image’s representational work is
rarely evident enough to do without explanations (even ones as minimal as dates
or captions). Buck’s book, like Mason’s, reminds us that such texts rarely involve
“the straightforward discursive or narrative suturing of the verbal and visual,” in
which the “texts explain, narrate, describe, label, speak for (or to) the photo-
graphs” and the “photographs illustrate, exemplify, clarify, ground, and docu-
ment the text.”2 What happens when the text can’t quite explain the image, when
it either foregrounds its interpretive work as the work of a body trying to read, or
conceals it, is simply a more open version of what happens every time in a
“failure” that goes both ways: the text can never quite explain the image, and
the image can never perfectly exemplify the text. Their interactions plot the
sweeps and curvatures of their interactive meanings. This mutual “failure”
reminds us to approach both images and languages as media rather than as
systems, as “heterogeneous field[s] of discursive modes” rather than “universally
coded scheme[s] open to scientific explanation.”3
Seen in this light, Buck’s caption to the photograph of the Tiananmen parade—
both the physical relation she describes, the poring and the magnifying glass, and the
textual relation she establishes to it through her caption—opens up the larger
questions of the relation between image, text, and the kinds of knowing they
produce in combination that have been the subjects of a number of chapters so
far. If I begin this chapter with this moment from Buck’s work, then, it is to
recognize first of all the complex mediatic nature of the relation between sympathy
and images of suffering and thus to recall how strongly the history of a sympathetic
relation to China depends on the presentation of those kinds of evidence deemed to
have a privileged access to the real—be they watercolors, oil portraits, anecdotes, or
medical case reports. By attending particularly to the photograph’s ability to invoke
an absent reality, an ability so profound as to produce the desire to stare through the
photograph to the real, to insist on the ability of the photographic surface to
generate the impression of depth—a verticality for which the magnifying glass
becomes, in Buck’s hands, a formal as well as an epistemological index—I also
2
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), 94.
3
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 97. Throughout this paragraph, I am drawing on Mitchell’s work,
particularly his theoretical claim that “[A]ll arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media
are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive
modes,” which suggests that far more attention needs to be paid to mediatic form than has been done
so far in literary criticism (Picture Theory 94–95). Mitchell also tackles the possible objections to his
claim (95–99).
want to assert, recalling the lessons of anecdotal theory, that the work of photo-
graphic representation cannot simply be folded into a larger theory of the image
borrowed from Mason and Pu Qua, but must be attended to in terms of all the
specific mediatic, formal, and cultural processes through which the photograph
generates its meaning.4 For those reasons, this chapter, more than any since the first,
will make as much a methodological argument about its primary object—the
photograph of a Chinese man being executed in the early twentieth century—as it
does a historical or interpretive one.
1. The Anesthetic and the Aesthetic
Before getting to that photograph, however, let me stay with Buck a moment
longer. Late in China Past and Present, there appears a Marc Riboud picture of a
surgical operation (figure 6.1). The scene “could be taken from an American
television series,” Buck tells her readers. But it “was photographed in a modern
Chinese hospital in Wuhan . . . . The patient, a Chinese woman, is having a tumor
removed.” If this picture differed at all from something Americans might have
seen on the Marcus Welby show, it was not so much because the hospital was
Chinese as because of the medical procedure the doctors were performing. The
woman on the operating table “is conscious; she is eating slices of fruit put in her
mouth by a medical assistant; she feels no pain under the surgeon’s knife although
she has not been given an anaesthetic. Instead she is anaesthetized by acupunc-
ture” (CPP, 126).
In 1973, a year after the publication of Buck’s book, Susan Sontag, in Shanghai,
watched “a factory worker with advanced ulcers have nine-tenths of his stomach
removed under acupuncture anesthesia.” Four years later, recalling the operation in
On Photography, she wrote, “I managed to follow the three-hour procedure (the first
operation I’d ever observed) without queasiness, never once feeling the need to look
away.” Sontag went on to compare her experience of seeing the operation in person
to watching an operation on film: “In a movie theater in Paris a year later, the less
gory operation in [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s China documentary Chung Kuo
[1973] made me flinch at the first cut of the scalpel and avert my eyes several times
4
The early history of both photography and film suggests that the kinds of representation now
understood as natural to those media were in fact the products of experimentation, remediation, and
active discussion; see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive (Cambridge, 2002).
Fig 6.1 Acupuncture anesthesia. Photograph by Marc Riboud. Courtesy of Magnum

Photos.
during the sequence. One is vulnerable to disturbing events in the form of photo-
graphic images in a way that one is not to the real thing.”5
In the conjunction between these three experiences of “seeing” a surgical
operation in China, each occurring within a year of the others, one witnesses
first of all the success of a concerted campaign by the People’s Republic in the
early 1970s to advertise itself to the world as a modern nation-state. The combi-
nation of Western surgical theaters with Chinese acupuncture—what Buck calls,
inimitably, the combination of “the most modern Western hygienic manner” and
an “ancient” “technique centuries old”—signaled that China would become
“modern” by combining Western science with Chinese values, that is, by produc-
ing modernity through rather than against China’s cultural and historical heri-
tage.6 The anesthesia-by-acupuncture experience Riboud, Sontag, and Antonioni
5
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1977), 168. Further references in the text are cited as OP.
6
CPP, 124, 126. A report produced by the American Acupuncture Anesthesia Study Group
and published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1976 attributes the development of
acupuncture anesthesia in China to Mao’s 1958 “directive to explore traditional Chinese
medicine and integrate it with Chinese medical practice” (Acupuncture Anesthesia in the People’s
Republic of China, [Washington, 1976], 3).
disseminated to their respective audiences took place, therefore, within an inter-

national political frame in which the Chinese government exhibited its ability to
care for its own people after the Chinese fashion and modeled for the countries of
the world (especially those still on their way to modernity) an alternative to the
developmental trajectory traced out, in those days, by the United States and the
Soviet Union.
Though anesthesia was only one of the modes through which this performance
took place (others included industrialization, military prowess, the elevation of
folk culture to high culture, and agricultural innovation), it was in philosophical
terms an especially important one. The development of anesthesia in the West
had prompted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries major
shifts in the human relationship to pain, changes perhaps best memorialized by
the neurologist S. Weir Mitchell who, speaking at Massachusetts General Hospital
on the fiftieth anniversary of “Ether Day” in 1896, announced that no future gift
to humankind would be as welcome as the hour in which “hope, doubt, and
fears / ’Mid deepening stillness, watched one eager brain, / With Godlike will,
decree the Death of Pain.”7 No less than the Death of Pain, then, was the result of
anesthesia’s discovery in 1846, a discovery whose epochal pretensions were given
weight by such mid–twentieth-century histories as Victory over Pain (1946),
Kampf gegen Schmerz und Tod (The Struggle Against Pain and Death, published
in English as Triumph over Pain in 1938), and Man against Pain: The Epic of
Anesthesia (1945). Anesthesia was not just any old triumph, but one over human-
kind’s oldest foe, over the very thing that might be said, for readers of Elaine
Scarry, to define the human as such. As a medical practice that could replicate (or
even improve upon) the “modern” solution to the problem of surgical medical
care, and that had been around since long before the West’s modernization,
acupuncture could go a long way toward suggesting that modernity was not the
exclusive property of the globalizing, post-industrial West.
7
Cited in David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley, 1991), 65. Martin Pernick’s history of the
cultural reception of chemical anesthesia in the United States and Europe shows that the practice was
met with genuinely mixed responses after its discovery in 1846, responses which kept anesthesia from
being universally practiced and universally recognized as a boon to humankind until the late 1870s. As
Pernick shows, many surgeries were performed without anesthesia in this period. Mitchell’s 1896 poem
should be taken, therefore, as representative of the attitude toward anesthesia’s invention which began
to dominate in the late nineteenth century and which predominates today, in which it is seen as an
unmitigated good (A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century
America [New York, 1985].). One critique of the view of pain promoted by anesthetic thinking appears
in Morris.
I will be worrying the conjunction of Buck’s description of the Riboud

photograph as a potential still from an American television series, Sontag’s
discussion of her experience, and the Antonioni film in the context of a broad
theory of photography for the rest of this chapter. Let me begin by suggesting
something about the relation between anesthesia and the photographic that will
ground that theoretical connection. In an essay that revisits Walter Benjamin’s
famous theory of the work of art in modernity’s technological age, Susan Buck-
Morss explicitly connects cinematic forms of looking with the development of
modern anesthesia. She suggests that the surgeon’s relation to the patient changed
radically when the former could perform operations without having to respond
to the patient as a person. “Whereas surgeons earlier had to train themselves to
repress empathic identification with the suffering patient,” she writes, “now they
had only to confront an inert, insensate mass that they could tinker with without
emotional involvement.”8 This perceptual transformation was given physical
form in the transformation of the operating “theater” at the end of the nineteenth
century, when “discoveries in germ theory and antiseptics transformed the
operating room from theatrical stage into a tile-and-marble, scrubbed-
down, sterilized environment” in which the audience was separated from the
proscenium by a glass partition. That “glass window became a projection screen,”
in which the “tripartite division of perceptual perspective—agent, matter, and
observer—paralleled the brand new, contemporary experience of the cinema”
(AA, 32).9 In other words, the perceptual transformation created by the develop-
ment of anesthesia and of modern surgery reproduced the agential splitting
between actor, object, and observer that typified modern photography. Not for
8
Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsid-
ered.” October 62 (Autumn 1992), 28. Further references in the text are cited as AA. Indeed, the history
of surgery before anesthesia was a far less sterile thing and not just because of the development of germ
theory. Operating theaters were usually located in hospital basements or on their upper floors, as far as
possible from other patients, so that the ringing screams of those under the knife wouldn’t be found
too disturbing. Some patients refused treatment or committed suicide rather than be operated on;
some aspiring surgeons abandoned their profession rather than live with their patients’ suffering. For
an overview of surgery before anesthesia, see Julie M. Fenster, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s
Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (New York, 2001), chapter 2. Pernick,
incidentally, cites at least six sources using variants of the phrase “boon to suffering humanity” in
relation to anesthesia (290n3); “the pangs of suffering humanity,” you will recall, were specifically the
subject of attention from the compassionate Brits described in George Henry Mason’s preface to The
Punishments of China.
9
As the fact that the operating space was called a “theater” prior to this transformation suggests,
these changes reflect shifts in the mediatic experience of surgical procedure and not a new mediatiza-
tion of something that had previously been “natural” or unmediated by representational codes.
nothing, then, did Benjamin compare the surgeon to the cameraman, as Buck-
Morss notes: “the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the
patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into
him. Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter
maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates
deeply into its web.”10
Here, we come to the negative version of “anesthesia,” the death of feeling not
as triumph over pain but as capitulation to the dehumanizing gaze of modern
techno-capitalism. If the spatial arrangement of the operating theater after
anesthesia owed something to the codes of camera vision, or rather, if both the
operating chamber and the camera lucida of the real world were in the late
nineteenth century reconceived as visual spaces in accordance with the demands
of new forms of perception, then both the camera and operating theater were
cultural expressions of Western modernity in its most malevolent aspect. And this
aspect might be said to derive the aesthetic of its looking from the anesthetic
treatment of the world as a just another spectacle, the body as just another thing.
In other words, looking at Buck’s photograph of an operation means looking
at a photograph of something that has already been arranged photographically,
partly because all looking has been transformed by the advent of the camera that
organizes the world according to its perceptual rules. And this not just for the
photographs: even when witnessing the operation, the distance created by the
separation of surgical table from audience—itself a kind of anesthetizing force in
relation to the potential experience of sympathetic pain, Buck-Morss writes—
reflects and reproduces the experience of photographic vision. Such an account of
the general relation between the camera and anesthesia suggests that every
surgical scene expresses a photographic pose, because the fact of anesthetic
perception (an anesthetic aesthetic) has been encoded in advance inside the
camera as an apparatus.
Sontag’s account of her experience in China offers an occasion for reading the
relationship between modern ways of seeing and the operating theater. “One is
vulnerable to disturbing events in the form of photographic images in a way that
10
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York, 1969), 233.
Part of this has to do, ironically, with the excessive stimulation of modern culture, which turns out to
be deadening, a position that one finds already in Edmund Burke’s writing on the French revolution;
see Steven Bruhm, “Aesthetics and Anesthetics at the Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 32:3 (Fall
1993), 407.
one is not to the real thing,” Sontag had written. “In the operating room, I am the
one who changes focus, who makes the close-ups and the medium shots. In
the theater, Antonioni has already chosen what parts of the operation I can watch;
the camera looks for me—and obliges me to look, leaving as my only option not
to look” (OP, 169). Though Sontag may wish to differentiate her experience from
Antonioni’s filmic representation of it, the way she describes the operation—
where like Benjamin’s painter she faces the patient “man to man”—borrows all its
terms from the language of cinema. Standing in the operating room,
Sontag arranges her close-ups and medium shots, changes the focus of her
attention. Hers is a model for live seeing already “penetrated” by the cinematic
apparatus; the only argument with Antonioni is about who gets to control the
camera.
The closeness between Sontag and Antonioni, their basic acceptance of a mode
of looking connected to the operation’s self-presentation as something suitable
for photographing, is confirmed in Sontag’s next paragraph. There, the separa-
tion Sontag imagines between her subjective vision and Antonioni’s camera eye
collapses into the objective case of the first person plural pronoun: “Nothing
could be more instructive about the meaning of photography for us—as, among
other things, a manner of hyping up the real—than the attacks on Antonioni’s
film in the Chinese press in early 1974” (OP, 169). The “us” at the end of the first
clause herds Antonioni and Sontag into the broader category of the West, its
differences erased in the comparison with that other great family of man, the
PRC. Sontag devotes the book’s next ten pages to showing how the controversy
over Antonioni’s documentary illustrates major cultural differences in both the
experience of photographic technology and in politico-aesthetic modes of per-
ception. What appeared in On Photography’s first 168 pages to be a theory of
technological and cultural modernity articulated around photography in general
becomes, at the precise moment when Sontag mentions seeing acupuncture
anesthesia in China, a theory of photography as a particularly Western form of
experience, as an aesthetic mode suitable to a particular cultural geography. Why?
Let me back up. In 1972, Antonioni traveled to China at the invitation of the
PRC government and spent twenty-two days filming the documentary that be-
came Chung Kuo (China). The film met with a positive response at its first showing
in 1973 for members of the Chinese embassy in Rome, before rapidly becoming the
subject of enormous international controversy. It was extensively denounced by
the PRC, which organized demonstrations against the film in China and pressured
national governments to cancel public screenings (in 1975, the film could not be
shown at the Venice Biennialle, though it was screened elsewhere in the city).
According to its critics, Chung Kuo insulted China by minimizing its industrial
progress, suggesting that the Cultural Revolution was merely a sham, and pre-
senting the country in cold, stark colors that made it look bleak and desolated. “He
ignored busy motor traffic on the highways but picked only ox-carts and wheel-
barrows,” wrote Yang Kuei, the chairman of the Linhsien County Revolutionary
Committee. “He paid no attention to big and small tractors working in the fields,
but chose only a donkey pulling a stone roller. He skipped the stirring sights of
collective labour and turned his camera solely on old people and a sick woman.”11
Antonioni, stung by the criticism, insisted in response that his film was an
expression of interest in and even love for China and its people.12
Umberto Eco, writing in 1977, suggested that the film “reminds us that when
political debate and artistic representation involve different cultures on a world-
wide scale, art and politics are also mediated by anthropology and thus by
semiology.” No dialogue about international structures of social class can be
opened, Eco wrote, “if we do not first resolve the problem of symbolic super-
structures through which different civilizations represent to themselves the same
political and social problems.”13 This clarity of this assessment of the differences
between the official Chinese perspective on the film and Antonioni’s suggests that
what was at stake in the film was not so much its content—though there were
complaints in that regard—but its aesthetic form. One of the most prominent
objections involved the claim, articulated by an anonymous writer for the Renmin
Ribao in an article translated and disseminated internationally by Beijing’s For-
eign Languages Press, that Antonioni’s shots of a new bridge over the Yangtze
River near Nanjing made it look dilapidated and unimpressive.14 Antonioni’s
11
Yang Kuei, “Refuting Antonioni’s Slanders Against Linhsien County,” Peking Review 17.8
(1974), 13.
12
The PRC also attempted unsuccessfully to stop showings of the documentary on Swedish and
German television. For more on the controversy, see Gideon Bachmann, “Antonioni After China: Art
Versus Science,” Film Quarterly 28.4 (1975); Umberto Eco, “De interpretatione, or the difficulty of being
Marco Polo,” Film Quarterly 30.4 (1977); and A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks: A Criticism of
M. Antonioni’s Anti-China Film China, written by an anonymous Renmin Ribao commentator (Peking,
1974). English-language criticisms of the film appeared in Peking Review 17.8 and 17.11 in 1974, of which
this statement by Fang Chun-sheng, a textile worker, is fairly typical: “Like all reactionaries, Antonioni
has inveterate hatred for the revolutionary cause of the Chinese people” (“Textile Workers’ Protest,”
Peking Review 17.8 (1974), 16.). In 2004, the documentary was publicly screened in China for the first
time as part of an Antonioni retrospective at the Beijing Film Academy.
13
Eco, 9.
14
“In photographing the Yangtze River Bridge…the camera was intentionally turned on this
magnificent modern bridge from very bad angles in order to make it appear crooked and tottering. A
shot of trousers hanging on a line to dry below the bridge is inserted as a mockery of the scene”
fairly lame response—that because it was a foggy day “I had to limit myself to take
shots of the bridge from closer by, and naturally, passing underneath it, the bridge
appears slightly deformed”—avoided the representational questions entirely.15
Like Eco, who reads the controversy as the product of different cultural
semiologies, themselves effects of “symbolic superstructures” operating at the
level of civilizational self-representation, Sontag argues that the critiques of
Antonioni’s film depended on profound differences in cultural ways of seeing.
“While for us photography is intimately connected with discontinuous ways of
seeing (the point is precisely to see the whole by means of a part—an arresting
detail, a striking way of cropping),” she wrote, “in China it is only connected with
continuity . . . there are proper ways of photographing, which derive from notions
about the moral order of space that preclude the very idea of photographic
seeing” (OP, 169–70).16 While for Eco the preference for frontal representation
over foreshortening might be understood as the expression of a cultural habit that
can be overcome through dialogue and discussion, Sontag makes the Chung Kuo
controversy stand in for a much larger and possibly irreconcilable difference
between continuity and discontinuity, East and West. The difference between a
moral order that rules out photographic seeing entirely and one interested in
discontinuity and fracture thus figures an enormous symbolic difference between
a West that favors seeing “numerous variations of something” and increasing “the
possibilities of meaning” and a China in which “only two realities” and two ways
of looking, the right way and the wrong way, can even be acknowledged (OP, 173).
This is an incredibly rich and complicated set of claims, and in another book I
could spend a great deal of time discussing them. As far as this book is concerned, let
(Vicious Motive, 11). A Riboud photograph of that same bridge, one of the great architectural feats of
Chinese modernization in the early 1970s, appears in Buck’s China Past and Present (113). As Buck
notes, nationalist pride in the bridge’s construction depended partly on the fact that it was built after
the withdrawal of Soviet assistance because of tensions between the two communist countries.
Another Riboud photograph, of the bridge under construction, appears in The Three Banners of
China (New York, 1966), 96–97.
15
Cited in Bachmann, 30.
16
Sontag’s reference to the “arresting detail” as a figure for modern aesthetics can be connected
to the larger “humanitarian narrative” that organizes the Western perception of pain after the
eighteenth century. Thomas Laqueur argues that the attention to detail in the modern novel and in
medical case histories, which “present in purest form the amassing and ordering of vast quantities of
detail so as to make real the pain of others,” has an origin in the general epistemological and cultural
shift that Thomas Haskell has described (Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,”
The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt [Berkeley, 1989], 182 and Haskell, “Capitalism and the
Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism, ed.
Thomas Bender [Berkeley, 1992].).
us simply note that Sontag implicitly theorizes here, once again, the possibility of a
non-Western modernity, articulated as a set of aesthetic practices that allow China
to consume the “goods” of Western modernity without simultaneously taking on
the burden of their cultural content, just as the use of acupuncture anesthesia
allowed China to show that it could produce modernity’s goods in a way that was
culturally Chinese: anesthesia without anesthetics, cameras without photography.
Given what “photography” meant for Sontag—shifts in visual points of view,
“discontinuous ways of seeing” produced by dramatic cropping or alteration of
visual angles, the “hyping of the real” that occurs in the montage of photographic
magazines or contemporary film—this suggested, finally, that China might have a
modernity without modernism, a modernity disconnected from the set of visual
practices with which it is most commonly associated in the West. Photography “in
our sense,” Sontag wrote, “has no place in their society” (OP, 174).
In the 1970s, at least, Antonioni seemed far less capable than Sontag of seeing
the debate over his documentary as produced by anything other than a Chinese
misunderstanding of his motives. In a 1975 interview, he defended himself against
the Chinese response: “It has been said that I’ve denigrated Chinese children.
I don’t really know why. I made shots of those children while they were singing
their little songs; their delicious little faces. They are really beautiful, Chinese
children, and if I could, I would adopt one.”17 At the intersection of international
symbolic superstructures, the willingness to adopt a Chinese child—the ultimate,
and ultimately transnational, good intention, occurring here in the echo of Buck’s
1949 founding of Welcome House, an organization designed to encourage the
adoption of Chinese children in the United States—becomes proof against
photographic violence, as though the assertion of an intention to care could
undo the discontinuous ruptures of form.18
As Sontag suggests, however, it’s precisely the difference between aesthetic
form and loving care that is at stake in Chung Kuo. If photographic seeing cares
for the world it sees by breaking it into ever-newer pieces, then anyone for whom
care means being seen whole will experience photographic “love” as a gesture of
intolerable violence, and may ask to be seen on other terms, demanding not only
to choose the close-ups, but insisting that the Mr. DeMilles of the world not shoot
close-ups at all. Here the dream of photography’s ability to grant the planet a
singular, shared mode of representation—as one optimistic journalist put it in
17
Cited in Bachmann, 30.
18
And perhaps it can, though it did not for Antonioni.
1840, photography would be “the first universal language addressing itself to all
who possess vision and in characters alike understood in the course of civilization
and the hut of the savage”—founders upon the recognition that the apparatus of
“photographic seeing” that Sontag attributes to the West is not the necessary
consequence of the invention of the camera.19
2. Geographies of the Anesthetic
How does one understand, in relation to the complex historical knot that unites
photography, anesthesia, and the acupuncture operations of the early 1970s, the
circulation during most of the twentieth century of photographs like the one
reproduced here (figure 6.2)?20 This picture of a man being executed at the end of
the Qing dynasty, in the early 1900s, was almost certainly taken by a European.
Other photographs of executions like this one—which involves the procedure
called in Chinese lingchi, in English the death of a thousand cuts, that was
discussed in Mason’s 1801 book on Chinese costumes—were part of a postcard
series, called Les supplices chinois (Chinese tortures), which circulated between
19
Cited in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
(New York, 1995), 123.
20
Mieke Bal once told a group of people I was in that when she has to reproduce a picture she
considers “pornographic,” she goes to some efforts to do so without actually reproducing it “whole”—
reducing it in size, cropping it in ways that reduce its force, and so forth. My sense is that too much
respect for the image—a respect that would declare, for instance, that it is unethical to reproduce it at
all—simply replicates the image’s violence by making it into a fetish for the power of the visual (on this
see Rey Chow, who asks for “a careful reading of the materiality of the images” [Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, 1993), 40].). Such a position is
fundamentally incompatible with the major goals of this chapter and this book, which aims partly to
show how the “respect” granted an other (a human other, or otherness in the form of pain or violence)
almost always leads to a declaration that the other can only be subject to certain kinds of simple
reading. What looks like it wants to protect the other, however, ends up protecting it from things like
literary reading or the aesthetic that are almost always the modes in which the one doing the protecting
comes to value objects outside of the instrumental. In reproducing this image and in reading it, then,
I am attempting to engage it and the scene it reproduces as well as I know how—by treating it as a
member of the community of worldly texts that can be subject to historical and literary critical modes
of reading (of which this book is also, finally, a member). Beyond the general theoretical argument,
one might ask whether my particular reproduction of this image is ethical, that is, whether the use to
which I put that image here and the reading that I do of it do not simply reproduce its violence in ways
that disregard my responsibilities to the readers of this book (as members of a community to which
I belong, and as members of communities to which I do not belong), or to the people the image shows.
That is a real question. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong.
Fig 6.2 “The death of a

thousand cuts.” Courtesy
of Jérôme Bourgon.
China and France in the early part of the last century.21 Similar photographs
appeared in books published in France, Belgium, and Germany between 1909 and
1926, in sources ranging from Ferdinand Joseph Harfeld’s Opinions Chinoises sur
les Barbares d’Occident (1909) to Louis Carpeaux’s Pékin qui s’en va (1913), to
Georges Dumas’s Traité de psychologie (1923).22 A print of this photograph
belonged to Georges Bataille for most of his adult life. He refers to it in his
21
On lingchi, see Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts
(Cambridge, Mass., 2008). On the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen, who has used as raw material
photographs of Chinese victims of violence, including this one, modifying them by inserting his own
face into the photographic scene, see Joyce C. H. Liu, “The Gaze of Revolt: Chen Chieh-Jen’s historical
images and his aesthetic of horror” available online at http://www.srcs.nctu.edu.tw/joyceliu/mworks/
mw-interart/GazeOf Revolt/GazeOf Revolt.htm; see also Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in
Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York, 2008).
22
The appearance of these three books in a list should not obscure important differences in their
attitudes and presentations of images of lingchi. In Harfeld, for instance, the images are offered as
evidence of the inappropriateness of Chinese judicial punishment during a dialogue between a
Chinese mandarin and a Westerner on the question of exterritoriality. The Western speaker describes
an execution by crucifixion, and says, “Avouez que ce mode de répression est un peu vif, de même que le
‘ling hi,’ d’ailleurs” (“admit that this mode of punishment is a bit much, just like the ‘ling hi,’ for that
matter” [74]). A brief discussion follows, in which the Chinese speaker suggests that the lingchi is not
as bad as it seems, and the Westerner replies that it (and judicial torture in general) nonetheless justify
the temporary extension of extraterritoriality. The dialogue segues into a discussion of feng shui.
Though the first use of “ling hi” is footnoted with an elaboration and illustrated with six images, its
books Guilty and Inner Experience. It appears as an image for the first time in his
work in Tears of Eros in 1961.
The meaning of this photograph, and even the obvious “content” of this
image, depend profoundly on the context of its circulation. In a discussion of
the psychology of crowds, the image instantiates; as a postcard, it titillates; as a
family keepsake, it commemorates; in a newspaper report, it illustrates. Any
apprehension of the image, then, begins with a circulatory context that privileges
certain kinds of reading and obscures others. (A complete reading of this
photograph—of any photograph—could therefore attempt to record, or imagine,
all its possible and actual modes of circulation.) I would like to begin by
foregrounding two of this photograph’s major contexts: first its circulation as
one of a number of images of this type, and thus its production of codes that
belong to a broader historical class; second, its history as the subject of Bataille’s
writing and thought.
As an example of a class of photos, this photograph is also, one might say, a
picture of an example. That is, insofar as this photograph participates in a general
European interest in pictures or descriptions of Chinese torture that one can trace
back to the sixteenth century, it does so because it reproduces Chinese judicial
violence as a typological instance whose most profound communication is
anthropological.
This communication emerges from the difference between how the photo-
graph looks and the looking it sees. It may be banal to say that the photograph’s
subjects—not just the condemned man, but the crowd that bends inward toward
the executioner who, seen from behind, saws at the knee—owe their arrangement
in space to codes borrowed from culturally specific habits of perspective and
representation, some of which are encoded in advance in the camera as a
machine. Nonetheless, a reading of the photograph can usefully begin with the
difference between the “perspective” it organizes and the “event” to which it
refers, and the manner in which the perspective modifies the content of the event
it shows. I am not suggesting that there could be an authentic or appropriate
perspective on this event to which one could compare the photograph’s perspec-
tive. But that the photograph as photograph already contains within itself as a
condition of its own readability the difference between the how and the what:
how it shows, and what it shows.
appearance in the text remains subordinate to the larger discussion at hand, which attempts to give
voice to the legitimate grievances Chinese people might have against the West (see vii–viii).
In the photograph, the members of the crowd have arranged themselves in a

physical and scopic circle around the condemned man’s leg. The crowd that
seems to surround the condemned man does not, in fact, surround “him”; the
direction of its attention is firmly on the state-sponsored violence metonymized
and embodied by the figure of executioner at work (two men in the back crane
their necks to look at, what? . . . not the man’s face; his leg). The photograph
shows the crowd, but it also shows what the crowd does not attend to, the
condemned man’s face and torso. His body faces the camera. A reading of
the photograph according to aesthetic codes could remark the line that follows
the executioner’s back, the stake, directly to the man’s chest, which, as it is more
in focus and less faded than his face, becomes the major focal point of the
photograph itself. Because the man’s chest has been cut open, it is the site of
the viewer’s greatest vulnerability to sympathetic pain; it is in this sense the “face”
of the photograph, and its apertures stare, like eyes, back at the viewer (we do not
see the faces of the executioner and his helper, both of whom have their backs to
the camera).23 The eyes of the victim’s face are blank. The condemned man’s body
faces the camera as the face of his pain, the surface of his suffering and the
violence that produces it.24
With its eye on this face, the photograph offers its audience the possibility of
reading the man’s suffering in relation to the indifference of the crowd, whose
focus lies instead on what one might call the execution’s technical side. The
photograph sees not only the original event, located in reality’s apparent zero
degree, of the execution of a condemned man, but also a looking at that event
which, while located in the photograph’s internal referential space, nonetheless is
referred to and commented on by the photograph’s own regard. The gap between
what the photograph shows and how it shows it can therefore be understood as
folded into the internal space of its own reference. It shows an unseen showing, a
given-to-be-seen that it witnesses and records, even as it also shows a failure on
23
A reading of the chest wounds as apertures also appears in Chen Chieh-Jen’s film Lingchi,
which shows a reenactment of the scene in the Bataille photo. At one point, the camera films from
inside the chest in order to look back at the crowd that stares at the victim’s execution. For a reading of
the film in the general context of historical violence in China, see Berry.
24
Let us be clear—we are in the presence once more of a “language of agency” in relation to pain
that does not show the man’s pain so much as it produces metaphors that signify pain. Given that
those put to death by lingchi were apparently given opium in order to keep them from dying too
quickly from the shock produced by the pain of the flaying, it is possible that the condemned man was
not feeling any pain at all at the moment the photograph was taken. The photograph does not
therefore “show” the condemned man’s actual pain, but rather generates sympathetic pain in the
viewer.
the part of another set of looks to register the spectacle of the body as it is given to
be seen: the photograph shows, that is, its own seeing and another seeing; it sees
both its seeing and another, internal seeing. Among the subjects of the photo-
graph is this difference, produced by the how of the what.
This triangular structure, familiar from the discussion of Bertrand Russell and
the Chinese dog in chapter 5, can be thought in relation to Buck-Morss’s theory of
photography. Buck-Morss had argued that the camera’s “transformation of
perception” depended on the split it induced between agent (the camera), matter
(the referential real world), and observer (the spectator). In this image, the
photographer’s gaze surgically penetrates the inert matter of Chinese life on
behalf of an observer back home who will encounter China (or “Chineseness”
more generally) as an anesthetized and objectified body, that is, a body that
cannot intervene in its own self-production as subject. The separation between
agent, inert matter, and observer occurs at the intersection of the photographer’s
experience of the execution as practice and the ability to record the execution in
mediatic form.25
That separation, understood in the context of the photograph’s circulation as a
postcard, illustration of a foreign curiosity, generates the photograph’s relation to
cultural specificity. The crowd’s indifference to the violence and suffering, the
difference between the general look of the Chinese crowd and the single look
shared by the victim and the photographer, tells the audience of the postcard not
only that such terrible things happen but that some group of people can be
indifferent to them. In Buck-Morrss’s terms, the photograph’s penetration of
Chinese life (and thus its “anesthetization” of the body of the image) occurs at
least partly in order to critique the anesthetized regard of the Chinese crowd, to
contrast the photographer’s own sensitive relation to the condemned man’s pain
with the crowd’s anesthetized indifference. At the cultural level, then, the
photograph aligns itself with an Enlightenment faith in the representationality
25
This is fairly clear also in Carpeaux’s Pékin qui s’en va, which registers the execution of
Fou-Tchou-Li in both words and photographs: “La foule innombrable regardait d’un oeil indifférent
ce beau corps d’ivoire dont l’harmonie des formes sculpturales était vouée à la boucherie infâme” (“The
enormous crowd looked with an indifferent eye at this beautiful ivory body, whose sculpturally formal
harmony was destined for vile butchery”) (185). In this instance, the crowd’s indifference is simulta-
neously directed at Fou-Tchou-Li’s suffering and at his body conceived as an aesthetic object (“beau
corps d’ivoire,” etc.). Of the Bataille photograph, one might say that the crowd both fails to appreciate
the victim’s pain—it is anesthetized to it—and that it fails to appreciate the aesthetic perspective from
which it might observe the victim as the potential subject of a photograph, a perspective shared by
both the photographer and whoever observes the image. The separation between the agent and the
matter is thereby doubled.
of representation and the universal value of the human, a sense that what the
image shows is realistic both in the scene it shows and in the conclusions it
proposes. It is precisely insofar as it does so that it, of course, does violence to the
Chinese crowd by turning it into the anesthetized object of its surgical gaze. (That
the execution the crowd happens to be witnessing is also a vivisection, and
therefore a bleak metonym of actual surgical practice, effectively closes the
interpretive circle.)
Considered as an example of a type, then, the photograph’s reading of Chinese
pain resembles very much Russell’s, though this image, unlike Russell’s story of
the dog in the street, is layered over with the possibility of a fascinated, even
pornographic pleasure in the destruction of a body-life, the transformation of a
life into a body. In the sense that the photograph as photograph collaborates in
this pleasure, it does so by turning the scene into an object, by reducing rather
than intensifying the pain to which it refers; like the surgeon operating on the
flesh of an inert body, the image objectifies what it acts on.26 It is in this sense that
the photograph reproduces something of the European relation to China in the
modern era.27
26
Perhaps the most extreme expression of such a relation to the photograph in general comes
from Ernst Jünger, whose 1934 essay “On Pain” Buck-Morss cites as an instance of the total expression
of fascist aesthetics. In the essay, Jünger approvingly notes the evolution of a new “human type” that he
connects directly to “revolutionary fact of photography” (“Photography and the ‘Second Conscious-
ness’: An Excerpt from On Pain,” trans. Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips [New York, 1989] 208, 207.).
Connecting the photograph’s invulnerable eye to the new technologies of war and newly mass-
mediated politics (where the “photograph is a weapon that is being used with increasing mastery”),
Jünger envisioned nothing less than the development of a new “second” consciousness that would
radically transform the human relation to pain: “As the process of objectification progresses, the
amount of pain that can be endured grows as well. It almost seems as if man had an urge to create a
space where, in a sense quite different from the one we are accustomed to, pain can be regarded as an
illusion” (209–10). Here, the objectifying properties of photographic vision are turned to the produc-
tion of a new generation of human beings capable of dissociating themselves from their own bodies,
and thus from their own physical embeddedness in the world.
27
James Hevia makes a different photograph of a Chinese execution figure the relationship
between Europe and the West. The photograph he reproduces, taken from a booklet titled Unique
Photographs of the Execution of Boxers in China, shows three British soldiers supervising the beheading
of several men in 1900. A pillar near the execution ground, reproduced on the right side of the
photograph, advertises English lessons. Hevia reads these two facts—the execution and the advertise-
ment—as illustrations of the “hard” and “soft” sides of imperial power (English Lessons: The Pedagogy
of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China [Durham, 2003], 3.). The photograph Hevia reproduces
represents far more openly than Bataille’s a relation to China arranged around military force and
Western imperialism. Perhaps it is precisely because such a relation—that of the execution of colonial
Bataille’s relation to the photograph can be read as a complete refusal of

photographic objectification, an attempt to unmake both the photograph’s sur-
gical relation to its subject and the humanist, Russellian response that would
condemn Chinese violence. Bataille’s stature as a major figure in modern French
literature and philosophy means that this superidentificatory relation to the
photograph, and his reproductions of the photograph in descriptions and as
image in his books, have historically produced a circuit of representation that
competes with and, in certain contexts, overshadows the reading of the photo-
graph I have pursued so far. In circles that exchange philosophy rather than
postcards, Bataille, far more than the unknown person who took the picture, is
the origin of its circulation. It is through his patronage that this photograph, now
signifying something beyond Chinese violence, becomes “legendary.”28
Though Bataille did not reproduce the photograph until it appeared in Tears of
Eros in 1961, it appeared in his writing on several occasions before the war. In
Inner Experience (1943), it provides a possible opening to ecstatic meditation:
I had recourse to upsetting images. In particular, I would gaze at the

photographic image—or sometimes the memory which I have of it—of
a Chinese man who must have been tortured in my lifetime. Of this
torture, I had had in the past a series of successive representations. In
the end, the patient writhed, his chest flayed, arms and legs cut off at the
elbows and the knees. His hair standing on end, hideous, haggard, striped
with blood, beautiful as a wasp.
I write “beautiful”! . . . something escapes me, flees from me, fear robs
me of myself and, as if I had wanted to stare at the sun, my eyes rebel.29
...
The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to
the work of the executioner—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic
rebels—is so connected to the production of capitalist modernity that Hevia’s photograph tells us less
about the kind of mythological relation to China that I am exploring here.
28
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, 2003), 98.
29
The sun’s blinding light is a vital figure for Bataille, dating back to Histoire de l’oeil and “The
Solar Anus.” Eduardo Cadava, writing of Walter Benjamin, declares in a section on “Heliotropism”
that “In the ancient correspondence between photography and philosophy, the photograph, related by
the trope of light, becomes a figure of knowledge as well as of nature, a solar language of cognition that
gives the mind and the senses access to the invisible” (Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of
History [Princeton, 1997], 5.). On Bataille and sunlight, see James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the
Nature of Seeing (New York, 1996), 103–05. On Bataille and the image, see Benjamin Noys, Georges
Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London, 2000), 18–37.
instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the

excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking,
not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is
opposed to ruin.30
These responses present the emotional and political difficulty typical of Bataille’s
work. His erasure of the condemned man’s life history, his passing over without
comment the cultural and historical circumstances that surrounded (and legit-
imized) this execution, the fact that he calls the man a “patient” and “beautiful as
a wasp”: all these, but especially the last, occur beyond the pale of a reasonable
relation to this image.
Bataille intends to resist just such “reasonableness.” If he refuses to address
himself to the man’s particular suffering it is, Amy Hollywood writes, “because to
uncover these dimensions of experience—to ask why such events occur and how
they can be stopped—is to provide a narrative for them that risks covering over
their sheer horror.” For Bataille, “narrative and historical contextualization
are . . . ways of evading the real.” Any attempt to ask how to resolve this violence,
to situate its causes, to trace its history, to register a protest in the name of a
common humanity, replicates the violence perpetrated on the body of the
speechless subaltern, forcing that body to mediate between its own pain and
the sign that emerges from its readability. Any relation to the body of the tortured
that aims to “provide a context in which demands for justice might be made” or
make it the site of an origin that would aim to prevent its repetition erases the
pain of that body, the experience of that body as a body, by making it into a
historical or political sign.31
Bataille’s reading of the photograph, which locates itself prior to any transfor-
mation of the condemned man into political use-value, attempts to interact with
the image by respecting the moment it captures in its being as a moment, the man
in his being as the man in the photograph. Rather than read the victim’s pain in
relation to the political or historical facts of state-sponsored violence, his biogra-
phy, or the medical mechanics of saws, knives, and bodies, Bataille elevates the
victim into a theological figure for a world beyond subjectivity, a world without
self-protection or even selves at all. In this, Bataille’s reading follows the theologi-
cal and cultural traditions dormant in the word supplice, which in its earlier uses
30
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany, N.Y., 1988), 119–20.
31
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History
(Chicago, 2002), 83.
Fig 6.3 George Henry Mason and Pu Qua, The Punishments of China. “The Capital
Punishment of the Cord.” Courtesy of The Huntington Library.
in French and English refers to a sacrifice that was “ceremonial in performance

and transcendent in meaning,” a notion embedded in European Christian culture
and explicitly associated with the crucified Jesus.32 The Christ-like arrangement
of the torture victim in Bataille’s photograph—or rather, the fact that this
photograph and not some other one was able to become the one through
which he communed with its victim—surely owes something to this cultural
habit, in which “punishment was tightly connected to redemption, martyrdom to
beatitude, and suffering to joy,” and in fact can be seen in earlier depictions of
Chinese punishment, for instance in this image, figure 6.3, from Mason’s Punish-
ments book.33
In relation to the organization of looking and seeing that presents itself as the
face of a photograph on Chinese practice, or in terms of the historical mode of
circulation of this photograph prior to its arrival in his hands, Bataille’s response
can only be a misreading. It ignores much of the photograph’s referential content
(the crowd, the executioners), not to mention its history of circulation, and its
32
Brook et al., 21.
33
Brook et al., 21.
mediatic status. But such a misreading is not necessarily false. Or rather, in reading
falsely, by ignoring aspects of the photograph’s referential space and its point of
view, it falsifies what is already false in the photograph, refusing the anthropologi-
cal gesture that leads either to a sense of cultural superiority or to a justified and
prosthetic intervention in the name of an asserted common humanity. Acting as
though the photograph could mediate transcendentally between himself and the
condemned man, Bataille pairs a complicity with the “death” present in all
photography with a genuinely violent disregard for the difference between a
picture of something and the thing itself. Bataille’s reading of the photograph is
not therefore “photographic” in Sontag’s sense; it aims to engage the photograph
through a sensory mechanism that resides beyond the visual. He does not so much
“look” at the photograph as commune with it.
This communion enacts its own violence, discarding the particulars of the
man’s history and suffering in favor of philosophical utility. As Hollywood writes,
“it is precisely the distance between Bataille and the victim that enables him both
to particularize the suffering other (in ways that efface the historical and political
grounds of his or her suffering) and to generalize from that individual to the
suffering of any and all human beings.”34 Though one can admire it for its refusal
of the photograph’s easy cultural superiority, then, Bataille’s position is not for all
that anthropologically innocent: Europeans and Americans have a long history of
finding the West’s ideational limit in the transformational ecstasy or suicide of a
positive identification with ethnic otherness. Bataille never mentions the con-
demned man without mentioning his Chineseness. (In Tears of Eros, the photo-
graph appears between a series of images of a voodoo ritual and the reproduction
of a European painting of Aztec human sacrifice.35) The geographic shadow
thereby cast over the argument suggests that the experience of extreme pain
Bataille sees in the photograph derives its force at least partly from the fact that
the picture’s referential origin is China.36 Bataille’s transformation of the photo-
34
Hollywood, 93.
35
The placement of the image in Larmes d’Eros undergoes some fairly significant changes
between the first and second editions. In the first edition image appears facing image a reproduction
of Balthus’s frankly erotic La Leçon de guitare (1934); whereas in the second the facing images are close-
ups and other images from the execution sequence. The third edition returns to the model of the first;
the only English-language edition adopts the structure of the second edition. In both cases the images
of voodoo and Aztec sacrifice are the immediate surrounding context for the images of the Chinese
execution. I am grateful to Jérôme Bourgon for drawing this shift to my attention.
36
This structure is almost inevitable in the modern West: why does the Other so often grant us
what we lack, restoring us to the fullness and plenitude we so desire? Because the Other is what we
define as that which has what we lack. The problem occurs, as Christopher Bush has shown, when the
graph’s victim from subject to insect, “young and seductive Chinese man” to
“wasp,” which resists the more general photographic objectification performed by
the photograph in the mode of its circulation as a postcard or a foreign curiosity
by remapping the man’s humanness onto categories of being—the insectoid and
the aesthetic—able to persist beyond his subjective death, loses some of its
philosophical force as a result.37 Bataille’s relation to the man in the photograph
remains “bewitched in the ambiguous circle of the sacred,” that is, in the
fundamental political structure of modern life.38 The philosophical pretensions
of Bataille’s argument may founder, it is true, on the grounds of his failure to
imagine an alternative to political life outside the pure possibility of transgres-
sion, but it may also be enough to say that they founder because the alternative
they imagine to Western modernity takes as its most transgressive figure someone
who Bataille cannot love without mentioning that he is from the East.
Considering now the relationship between this photograph of Bataille’s and a
more general theory of photography and anesthesia, one might say that Bataille’s
reading of the photograph attempts to overcome the photograph’s anesthetizing
and objectifying properties by inverting them, so that the photograph becomes in
his hands the communicative path between himself as an observer and the total
experience of the victim’s totalizing and absolute pain, and not an (an)aestheti-
cized look at “inert matter.” Rather than diminish the experience of pain, then,
the photograph seems to expand and extend it, making it possible for Bataille to
merge with the referential surface rather than “penetrate” it.39 At the same time,
racial other becomes the Other in general (“The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the
Location of the Modernist Signifier.” Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 [2005].). “Geographic
shadow” refers to Gayatri Spivak’s introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, in
which she notes that “the shadow of a geographical pattern . . . falls upon the first part of the book”
(Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak [Baltimore, 1976], lxxxii.).
37
In this context, consider this astonishing sentence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s, which appears in his
introduction to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 D’une Chine a l’autre: “The negroes did not concern me;
I’d been taught they were good dogs; with them, we were mammals together. But the Asian scared me;
like these crabs from the rice paddies which jump up from between two furrows, like the locusts which
descend on the great plain and devastate everything. We are kings of the fish, of the lions, of the rats,
and of the monkeys; the Chinese is a superior insect, he rules over the insects.” The comparison to
insects should recall the figure of the coolie, discussed in chapter 4.
38
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, 1998), 113.
39
Bataille’s relation to this particular photograph may be “erotic” but it is not sexual, though
elsewhere, of course, Batialle is the great twentieth-century elaborator of the relationship between pain
and pleasure. Karen Halttunen has placed the development of the relationship between pain and
one can argue, thinking of the geographic pattern of his subjective affiliation with
the victim in the picture, that this extreme subjectification and intensification of
real pain breaks through one anesthetic perspective only to adopt another
one. Though Bataille’s relation to the photograph cannot be considered “photo-
graphic” in the sense in which Sontag or Buck-Morss define it, his production of
an alternative mode of seeing through the Chinese figure in the image—a
figure which represents, in twentieth century Europe, evidence of China’s con-
nection to a pre-modern European past very much caught up in judicial violence
and, thus, a relation to pre-modern primitivity that cannot be ignored (remem-
ber the other images around this one: voodoo and Aztec sacrifice) must be
understood as a gesture of the same type as Sontag’s division of the world into
a dictatorship of the interesting and a dictatorship of the good. It is in this sense
that Bataille “re-objectifies” the victim in the image, by making his philosophical
significance dependent at least partially on the ethnic or national origin of the
scene of which he is a part. The difficulty philosophy has registering this kind of
geographic effect indicates, one might conclude, a kind of cognitive anesthesia, an
inability to perceive the importance of the place that it consistently fails to
perceive.
3. The Hyle: Intentions of the Image
Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer declared with some alarm that “the world
itself has taken on a ‘photographic face’; it can be photographed because it strives
to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots.”40
Kracauer’s argument, in some ways simply the more general case of Buck-
Morss’s reading of the operating theater, was that the world had come to arrange
pleasure, particularly as it was expressed in pornography, explicitly in contact with the same large-scale
development of humanitarianism that produced the dramatic rise in European and American
attention to pain beginning in the eighteenth century (“Humanitarianism and the Pornography of
Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100.2 [Apr. 1995].). She writes: “The
modern pornography of pain taking shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was
not merely a seamy sideline to humanitarian reform literature but rather an integral aspect of the
human sensibility” (304). The rise in the production of a “more modern kind of sexual writing” that
included depictions of the infliction of pain, especially the flogging pornography of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, allowed “the spectacle of suffering . . . [to become] the dominant convention of
sexual pornography by the early nineteenth century” (317).
40
Cited in Cadava, xxvii.
itself in accordance with the demands of a particular type of photography. But

Kracauer did not, Eduardo Cadava writes, simply think the world should refuse
its status as a photograph. Rather he believed that “the photographic present
returns eternally to the event of its death—a death that comes with the death of
understanding. . . . What remains at stake for [Kracauer] is the possibility of a
politics that, beginning from the presupposition of our mortality, asks us to be
answerable for these deaths,” deaths that included but were not reducible to the
horrors of the World War I and the fatal rhythms of Taylorized industrial
production.41 To think of the man in Bataille’s photograph as a figure for ecstatic
transformation, as Bataille does, is to approach an ethics that attempts to be
answerable to the image-death of the photograph as such by communicating
with the living-death of its indexed subject.
Such readings of photographs, which return insistently to the idea that any
given image is “an image of death,” and argue that “conjunction of death and the
photographed is in fact the very principle of photographic certitude,” present us
with some of the most compelling theoretical arguments about photographs
available today, at least partly because their vision of a world layered over with
death-images borrows from a quasi-tragic, quasi-theological reading of moder-
nity as an era of profound loss.42 But the relentless morbidity of such readings,
despite their ring of truth, misses in its death-drive something of the living
presence of the photograph as a material object, and so they are prone to
produce—as they do for Bataille in this instance—incomplete or finally uninter-
esting readings of the photographs they care for.
In phenomenology the term hyle is used “to describe that which is perceived
but not intended.” Buck-Morss uses Edmund Husserl’s example of a Dürer
woodcarving of a knight to explain the concept: “Although the wood is perceived
along with the knight’s image, it is not the meaning of perception. If you are
asked, what do you see? you will say, a knight (i.e., the surface image), not a piece
of wood.”43 Likewise, then, with the paper that sustains the photographic print,
the physical medium whose chemical malleability permits the aesthetic one its
being.
Nonetheless, the photograph is never simply an image, but always an image
attached to a particular material substrate that itself organizes and responds to
41
Cadava, xxviii–xxix.
42
Cadava, 10.
43
Buck-Morss, 28.
historical effects and affective relations.44 We can imagine one index of the hyle’s
intentions if we think of the way a photographic print organizes light. The print
generates a visual field “behind” and through itself, opening focal depth in a
rectangle some twenty inches square, even as it beams the light it reflects forward
in “front” of its surface like an inverted cone. Placed on a desk, the snapshot
makes a hole in the world, and the light that emerges from this hole casts its glare
over the desk entire; the photo can be picked up, handled, put face down or in a
drawer, its illuminations shifting as it moves.
This relation to light belongs to the print alone. Described in language or
reproduced in the pages of a book, the image is all front and no back, all surface;
the focal depth it generates has no physical counterpart in the real space behind or
beneath it. It retains its indexical or iconic qualities, its ability to refer to an
anthropological practice or an experiential limit, but loses what allowed it to be
held, to be differentiated and broken off from the world. As Elizabeth Edwards
and Janice Hart have argued, an approach to photographs “that acknowledges the
centrality of materiality allows one to look at and use images as socially salient
objects, as active and reciprocal rather than simply implications of authority,
control and passive consumption on one hand, or of aesthetic discourses and the
supremacy of individual vision on the other.”45
In following Edwards and Hart’s injunction to read photographs materially,
I intend to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis of Pu Qua’s
paintings in chapter 2, where an attention to the circulation of the image as a
commodity modified what might otherwise have seemed to be a purely formal
relationship between caption and image in Mason’s Punishments book. Instead of
focusing on the photograph’s status as a commodity located in the context of
international trade and intercultural representation, however, I would like to
discuss the photograph simply, or not so simply, as a material thing whose
physical properties tend to constellate a particular set of subjective responses,
to wonder how its status as an inanimate object constitutes human subjects, how
it moves them, how it threatens them, and how it shapes, positively or negatively,
44
Sontag begins On Photography with a meditation on the relation between photograph and
image, remarking that “with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to
produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store” (3).
45
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images
(New York, 2004), 15. On the materiality of the image, see also Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken:
Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, N.C., 1995), and Dick Hebdige,
Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London, 1988).
their relation to other subjects.46 To put it plainly, the problem of reading I am

addressing is this: How can one come to read and understand a thing that is also a
sign, a sign that is also a thing, without giving short shrift either to materiality or
meaning? How can one read a photograph as a picture of something, without
ignoring the something upon which that picture appears?47
The photograph of the execution I have been calling “Bataille’s photograph”
was given to him, he says, in 1925. Sontag says that it sat on his desk, “where he
could look at it every day.”48 Bataille’s biographer Michel Surya writes that
photographs of this execution “obsessed him,” and that he “often spoke of
them, and always kept them.”49 Bataille described this photograph twice in
writing before reproducing its image in Tears of Eros. In Inner Experience, he
mentions in a note that he had the photo “for a long time at home”; in Guilty he
calls it “my photo.” In Tears of Eros he writes, “Since 1925, I have owned one of
these snapshots. It was given to me by Borel, one of the first French psycho-
analysts. This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped
being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable.”50
Reading these sentences with an eye on the hyle of the image, it is worth recalling
Benjamin’s claim that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can
have to objects.” Each time Bataille mentions the photograph something in his
language points directly to its belonging to him.51
46
This sentence paraphrases and cites Bill Brown, who writes: “Methodological fetishism, then, is
not an error so much as it is a condition for thought, new thoughts about how inanimate objects
constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or
threaten their relation to other subjects” (“Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 [Autumn 2001], 7).
47
This discussion of the photograph’s material substrate owes a great deal Brown as well as to N.
Katherine Hayles; what I am trying to do here is to bring together Brown’s work on things with Hayles’
work (especially in Writing Machines [Cambridge, Mass., 2002] and How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics [Chicago, 1999]) on literary media in order to
pursue readings of the things I have been calling mediatic “substrates” or “surfaces,” upon or through
which representations are carved, written, chemically induced to appear, projected, spoken, played,
and so forth.
48
Regarding the Pain of Others, 98. Sontag lists no source for this fact, and I have not been able to
confirm it elsewhere.
49
Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and
Michael Richardson (London, 2002), 94.
50
Inner Experience, 119; Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (San Francisco, 1988), 38; The Tears of Eros,
trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco, 1989), 205–206, translation modified. Jérôme Bourgon has told me
in conversation that he is not sure that Bataille really owned a print of the image for as long as he
claims to have in Tears of Eros. If he did not, the description and desire circulating around its
ownership become more significant, not less, to this analysis.
51
Benjamin, Illuminations, 67.
But ownership is just one gesture in a broader economy of exposure and

concealment, transaction and adjudication, in which a print can be given as a gift,
placed on a desk or a wall, hidden from children, shown only to special friends,
fall out of an album or be dropped in a puddle or otherwise damaged or lost,
protected or exposed. The hyle of the photograph calls out to the subject as a
thing subject to the same cares or miseries as a subjective life. Rereading Bataille’s
descriptions of the image for clues about his relation to the print it appeared on,
one sees the consistent expression of the image’s material aspects, intimations
that its presence in his life was governed at least partly by an ethics of possession
and care arranged around the materiality of the photograph’s physical being.
How does the field of visual projection indexed by the image interact with the
field of auratic, possessive projection established by the photographic print? How
can the print be read in its totality as image-thing? And what can the answers to
those questions teach about the historical value of this particular image as it was
owned by Bataille, and about the larger problematic of anesthetizing vision and
aestheticized pain of which this photograph is a token?52
The souvenir’s “double function,” writes Susan Stewart, “is to authenticate a
past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to discredit the
present. The present is either too impersonal, too looming, or too alienating
compared to the intimate and direct experience of contact which the souvenir has
as its referent. This referent is authenticity.”53 Bataille’s photograph is a souvenir
in two senses; it marks within his own history his relationship with his psycho-
analyst, Adrien Borel, and thus memorializes a shared masculine bond that is
itself the product of a model of medical care. And, in its reference to both the
absolute terrifying pain of the condemned man and the “exotic,” “primitive”
temporality of late Qing dynasty China, the photograph remembers and
memorializes the possibility of an “authentically human” experience, where
52
Or even, but this is beyond the scope of this book, how do mediatic substrates become sites of
international transactions of feeling designed to alter political structures or international develop-
ment? Consider in this context the Saturday Review’s sponsorship of a World Travel Photographic
Awards contest beginning in 1954, which articulated itself in these terms: “East is East and West is West
and the twain shall meet in a camera” (cited in Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the
Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 [Berkeley, 2003], 115). The camera becomes a ground for armistice-
signing, like a moving train, perhaps, a figure for movement and transformation that resolves
ideological or cultural conflicts by opening up an imaginary and inhuman neutrality in the internal
space of the apparatus.
53
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, N.C., 1993), 139.
“authentically human” means something like “outside European modernity,” that

is, outside the dissipating tensions of the “modern” present.
The authenticity physically retrieved by the souvenir as the double marker of
real human experience and of genuine friendship depends largely on its status as a
thing, but Bataille’s souvenir was of course not just any old thing. Because his
souvenir was also a photograph, the entire memorial apparatus encoded in its
object-status is layered over with the fact that as an object the photograph is
always already a kind of souvenir, an image that indexes and memorializes a
certain moment in the past. The photograph in particular does this so intensely as
to produce a linguistic slippage between what it remembers and what it is, so that
people will point to photographs and say things like, “this is my son,” or, “this is a
man being executed in the early 1900s.”54 Even as it functions as a souvenir and is
thus connected to the potential retrieval of a visible moment or an experience, the
photograph is widely considered to be profoundly inauthentic, a terrifying
distortion of “natural” experience whose seductive authenticity must be resisted
in the name of other ways of seeing. These two functions of the photograph as the
most authentic possible souvenir and as the most inauthentic distortion of the
real are connected. Only because the photograph seems so authentic must its
inauthenticity be loudly and widely declaimed. This double asymptote of authen-
ticity and inauthenticity makes the photograph the perfect souvenir, since the
purpose of the souvenir is to embody enough authenticity to create nostalgia in
relation to an absent past, without ever embodying so much authenticity as to
fully assuage the nostalgia it creates (if it could, it would simply become the
experience it remembers, and thus cease to be a souvenir at all).
In relation, then, to what the image of Bataille’s photograph shows, one might say
that the print’s production of its authenticity as object relies heavily on the extremity
of the scene that it performs as image. More than that, however, one can also argue
that the photograph’s image of the transformation of life into death by way of the
figure of the mutilated body of the condemned man figures at the level of the image
the role of the photograph as thing; the print as souvenir perfectly captures the
threshold between the life of the object as the fully authentic expression of a set of
subjective desires (the friendship with Borel, the desire to commune with the
“young and seductive” man) and the failure of the object to be those desires
absolutely. In this sense, this souvenir-photograph recapitulates the dying of the
54
Barthes gives the former example in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York, 1981), 5.
condemned man by echoing the movement of authentic life-experience into au-

thentic corpse-souvenir—a corpse which to be authentic as a corpse must be
inauthentic as a live body. Thus, the care that Bataille offers the photograph is on
one hand a monstrous inversion of the lack of care for the condemned man depicted
in the image, and on the other a kind of recapitulation of precisely the process which
is occurring in the image itself, in which Bataille’s retention and care of the object as
the threshold between experience and representation—that is, as a souvenir—
reproduces in a fairly astonishing way the photograph’s own retention and care of
the image as an image of the threshold between life and death. Insofar as Bataille
cares for the photograph, then, insofar as he protects it against loss or damage (by
keeping it out of the rain, by knowing where it is), or grants it the right to mirror
back to him an idealized but absent subjectivity, he does so in perfect concord not
only with what it shows but also with what it is.55
Nothing here decides whether this concord is admirable, or obscene. But
attending to the particular material qualities of the photograph, and to the
specific cultural role it fills as souvenir, makes it possible to think of the photo-
graphic relation expressed by Bataille’s ownership of this image as something
more complex than simply “anesthetized.” If we allow the care and pride in
ownership Bataille exhibits in relation to this photograph to stand in for the
general care and pride in ownership people tend to have in relation to things then
it may not make sense to think of anesthetizing vision as objectifying at all. In an
essay on the traffic of East Asian trade goods throughout the United States in the
nineteenth century, Christopher Bush has juxtaposed the amount of care given to
and money spent on Chinese and Japanese objects during the late 1800s with the
amount of cultural racism and physical violence directed at Chinese and Japanese
people in that same period. The people would have been better off, he points out,
being treated like the objects. The idea that “objectifying” someone is inevitably a
bad thing, which depends on the idea that people are indifferent to the feelings of
55
Much of this analysis operates also for the postcard version of the image, but in the case of the
postcard the intensity of its role as souvenir is modified by the fact of its mass reproduction, and by the
movement of the postcard itself. Malek Alloula has written that the postcard sent by the European
abroad “is the fragmentary return to the mother country” because it “straddles two spaces: the one it
represents and the one it will reach” (The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
[Minneapolis, 1986], 4.). That prosthetic return home happens at the level of the object, not the image.
Here again, the intention of the hyle will be missed by a reader who is not the intended recipient of its
traveling message, which is tactile and physical rather than textual, though clearly the two levels
operate in concert and cannot, therefore, easily be considered apart from one another; as Mitchell
reminds us, all media are mixed media (Picture Theory, 94).
the objects they own—that they do not imbue them with subjectivity more or less
independent from their own—must be revised to account for this understanding.
Writing specifically on the quality of Japanese objects and the ways in which they
called out to be treated, Bush suggests that we might imagine between the subject
and object a “a less hierarchized, more multidirectional model in which reifica-
tion, commodification, aestheticization, and racialization can be understood as
historically related modalities of the relationship between abstraction and con-
cretion (including personification).”56
While photographic vision may anesthetize, then, it does not, strictly
speaking, “objectify,” or rather, in objectifying it runs the risk of undoing the
anesthetizing work implicit in its visual mode, since turning the raw material of
experience into a possessable thing will open it to modes of sympathy that are in
many cases more profound than the ones that bridge the gap between people. (In
another historical context, as Jonathan Lamb has shown, narratives written by
former slaves often adopted the conventions of the eighteenth-century genre
known as “it-narratives” or “object-tales” in order to announce the transforma-
tion of chattel into person.57) This is not to argue that relations to things are
unproblematic or simple, or to suggest that things are inevitably treated better
than people (or that they should or shouldn’t be). But I want to complicate
theories of the photograph’s anesthetizing vision that assume that the death of
feeling necessarily occurs when something becomes an object to be penetrated by
a surgeon or a camera eye, that is, when the agent is able to treat that which it acts
on as “inert matter.” Such theories misunderstand the history of human relations
to inert matter as it coalesces in things and overestimate the necessity of sympa-
thetic relations between human beings. Considered in relation to photographs of
56
Christopher Bush, “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age,” Representations 99
(Summer 2007), 85. On insects, see note 20 in chapter 4. The Chinese origin of photographs of lingchi
is not forgotten in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, where a man named Wong carries a folded up sheet
showing eight successive images of a death. But the importance of the image’s materiality can also be
measured by the care with which it emerges from Wong’s wallet, and then is returned to it: “The piece
of paper was folded in four, a black leather wallet opened its mouth like a crocodile and gobbled it up
from amidst the smoke” (Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa, [New York, 1966], 56.). The relation
between the paper and the wallet that holds it is so intense as to turn the wallet into another
intermediary figure of life and death: the Egyptian crocodile-god Sobek was widely believed to be
responsible both for fertility and for the punishment or rewarding of the dead. Wong’s interlocutor
Oliveira refers briefly to the most intense European example of the connection between sexual pleasure
and Chinese torture, Octave Mirbeau’s 1899 Le Jardin des supplices.
57
Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn
2001), 158.
people in extreme pain, like Bataille’s, this suggests that readings of such photo-
graphs as the archetypical figures of photographic anesthesia, or indeed, readings
of those photographs as allowing for theological identification with the other,
may depend not so much on what the image contains as on the interaction
between that image and the material surface upon which it appears. That same
photograph multiplied thousands of times and placed in the pages of Bataille’s
Tears of Eros may provoke, as it does in me, feelings of horror and despair, but
those feelings occur within the framework of my knowledge that I do not own
this picture, that it is not unique, and that I am not responsible for taking care of
it. In this sense, the image’s de-objectification through mass reproduction, the
way that it ceases to register as a single object once it is multiplied on the pages of
a published book, may in fact be more profoundly anesthetizing than the initial
moment of its capture on film. (Though even the mass reproduction of the object
creates structures of feeling, most visibly in the form of communities of owner-
ship; at stake here are differences within a system rather than a set of binaries
aligning singularity with aesthetics, mass production with anesthesia, and so on.)
The fact that Bataille owned the image as a photograph and not as a postcard thus
makes an enormous difference to his relation to it, even though a complete
reading of that relation would have to account, as I have tried to do, for the
fact that other images like it were circulating as postcards in the years before
Bataille put his photograph on his desk.
Returning to Bataille’s photograph with its materiality in mind, it seems

important now to try to make this analysis operate also at the level of the inside
of the image, to see what happens when we come back to the image “as such” and
attempt to read in its arrangement of light a relationship to the kinds of formal
structures I have been attending to at the level of the print.
Originally, you will recall, the discussion of the image according to Buck-
Morss’s tripartite structure of observation took the photographer as agent, the
execution as “inert matter,” and the various audiences of the image as postcard or
print as its observers, who watch passively from behind a “glass partition” as the
agent-photographer penetrates the body of the real. In this relationship, the
content of the image itself, its arrangement according to aesthetic (and anesthe-
tizing) codes decided on by the photographer, becomes the intending but unper-
ceived hyle of the image.
This “external” structure can be seen to repeat a structure that exists inside the
image itself, so that the image seems to anticipate its own production as photo-
graph. Considered solely from the perspective of the “standard” reading of the
image as an instance of Chinese indifference to pain, the “inert matter” pene-

trated by the photographic point of view that organizes the image is not so much
the entire field of perception as it is the behavior of the “crowd,” which in its
apparent indifference to the condemned man’s pain illustrates the historical
stereotype about Chinese indifference to suffering. It is the personality and values
of the crowd as crowd (and particularly as Chinese crowd) that are the subject of
the photographic “operation” that penetrates and reveals them.
If the crowd is the purely “inert matter” of the image, it is because the
photographic look that establishes the image as image organizes its sympathy
in relation to the condemned man. Through the sympathy established between
the agent of the photograph and the victim of its violence, the photograph
attempts to breach the barrier that separates agent from hyle. The blankness of
the victim’s eyes recapitulates and returns the look of the camera, mirroring the
photographer’s regard and allowing the camera to register in the figure whose
picture it takes a symbolic opening to light. Like the observer at the surgery, the
condemned man doubles the cinematic eye. But in doubling it from inside the
sphere of perception, from inside the theater, as it were, the condemned man also
comments on that eye. It is not that in this looking the blank apertures of the
man’s face (or even those of his bloody chest) retake the photograph as a picture
of the man behind the camera, but that in offering a reflection of that look they
suggest that the difference between the image and its perspectival frame is not so
much the difference between “inside” and “outside” as the difference between the
image’s “inside” and its own internal limit.
Drawing the photographic eye, the “agent” or “perspectival frame” of its
production, back into the interior of the photograph is an act of agency. Insofar
as the condemned man can be said to emerge from the hyle of the image as agent,
then, he does so only to acquire a limited power to call attention to certain features
of the image. But it is precisely because its agential intervention in the photograph
is so limited that this portion of the image can be said to exist as both hyle and not-
hyle. On one hand the image of the condemned man is the inert and aestheticized
body upon which the photograph operates; on the other it is the partial agent of
the image’s self-production as image. This seeming paradox, in which the “inert
matter” of the image responds as hyle to the status of the photographer-agent by
indicating the agent’s similarity to itself, is a model for sympathy and likeness that
moves from the anesthetized body of the image toward the self-confident
agent who attempts to penetrate it. Just as for the souvenir, “the possession of
the metonymic object is a kind of dispossession in that the presence of the object
all the more radically speaks to its status as a mere substation and to its
subsequent distance from the self,” here, in the photograph, the hyle of the image
reveals itself as the self-revelation of the agent inside the image whose outside it
pretends to be.58 Owning this photograph, then, is like owning a broken off and
vulnerable piece of the photographer-self. The generosity of both the image and
the print comes from their quiet revelation of this fact, and thus their restoration
of the hyle’s intention to the field of perception—where it had been lying unno-
ticed, like the wood in the carving, all along.
4. Modernity without Modernity
On one hand, the goal of this chapter has been to produce historical knowledge:
to show how certain kinds of relations to photography in the West articulated
themselves with reference to the Chinese example and how these relations figured
a broader connection between anesthesia and cinematic vision, the one that
Buck-Morss elaborates explicitly and at length in her 1992 essay. On the other,
the reading of the Bataille photograph in particular has aimed to show how the
relation between felt pain and that image—itself among the most notorious
representations of Chinese suffering in literary circles—could and did change
depending on how the image circulated. This focus on circulation turned, finally,
to a reading of the medium of the image as hyle, which showed that the
authenticity guaranteed by the features of the image could be understood as
partial effects of the authenticity referred to by the status of the print as souvenir.
By attending to the hyle of the image as a “thing” capable of eliciting powerful
subjective responses and of organizing relations between persons, I attempted to
revise the standard story about how photography works by noting that for most
of its history its major byproducts were not just images but things and by
suggesting that a complete theory of the photograph needed to consider both
those aspects of the photograph in order to read well.59
Insofar as the chapter can offer a model for that mode of reading, in which
the intentions of both the hyle and the image move into the field of percep-
58
Stewart, On Longing, 135 (emphases mine).
59
The interaction between image and thing produces a kind of interpretive “interference” of the
same type as the interference between image and caption, where the potential conflict in the felt
difference between image and text can also become a collaboration. I borrow the term “interference”
from Marsha Bryant, who uses it to refer to interactions between images and texts (“Introduction,”
Photo-textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature, ed. Marsha Bryant [Newark, N.J., 1996], 14.).
tion, it will have to return to the representations of acupuncture anesthesia

with which it began. Like the postcards of Chinese executions, those repre-
sentations circulated in mass mediatic form, belonging to no one in particu-
lar; though the hyle of their underlying physical form could be remembered
by associating the image’s production with the name of a particular artist,
they operated largely as indexical or documentary signs. In the case of these
pictures, however, one might say that the images themselves contained a
picture of their own hyle. Insofar as the operating table figured the photo-
graphic mechanism that captured it, the subject of the image can be said to be
“looking back” at the camera, registering in that regard the longstanding
fraternity between their ways of seeing.
My conclusion will hinge upon that last sentence, but before I explain it, let me
back up slightly. Anne McClintock has noted how in photographs taken for
colonial postcards, “primitive icons and atavistic relics were arranged around
sitters to metonymically signify an anachronistic relation to the technological
time of modernity.” In all colonial postcards, “time is reorganized as spectacle,”
the spectacularity of the image relying on its representation of a primitivity that
registers as foreign in both spatial and temporal dimensions.60 Part of what
“colonial” representations of a certain type show, then, is the temporal gap
between “primitivism” and “modernity,” a gap whose immediacy can be experi-
enced in the metropole thanks to the kinds of innovations in transportation,
photographic representation, and postal delivery that are themselves the emblems
of modernity whose location at the end of a narrative of historical progress they
reinforce.61 (The resulting conflation of time and space, in which the so-called
primitive becomes the contemporary figure for the past of modernity’s present,
generates the relation between temporality and otherness so elegantly discussed
by Johannes Fabian.62)
McClintock’s argument explains well the status of the image of the man
being tortured to death as the potential subject of a postcard. It also clarifies
60
McClintock, Imperial Leather, 125.
61
This is true for both the acupuncture images and for Bataille’s photograph, though as I will go
on to suggest the acupuncture representations complicate a simple here-present, there-past temporal-
ity. In the case of judicial torture, however, the written descriptions of the execution of Damiens the
regicide that open Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which illustrate there the movement of a judicial
mechanism that is, at the moment of writing, separated from the present by an epistemic shift that
makes such “punishment” unthinkable, will suggest that part of what Europeans observed in the image
I have been discussing here was their own repressed past refigured as an other present.
62
See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983).
some of the Chinese complaints about Antonioni’s film. Though it may have
seemed silly to some in the West to complain that Chung Kuo showed “a
donkey pulling a stone roller” instead of tractors in the fields, or ox-carts and
wheelbarrows instead of “busy motor traffic,” what was at stake was whether
the film would function as a colonial postcard whose primary spectacle was that
of China’s “primitive” past, or as an advertisement for the country’s “modern”
present.63 It may also explain, in turn, why there were no complaints about the
documentary’s surgical scene: no matter how discontinuously shot it was, no
matter how much the symbolic superstructure of its representation differed
culturally from China’s, it nonetheless testified powerfully at the level of its
content to the fact that the Chinese had “learned” how to do modern surgery.
As Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham put it, “More than any other develop-
ment, this acupuncture analgesia . . . has had the effect of obliging physicians
and neuro-physiologists in other parts of the world to take Chinese medicine
seriously, almost for the first time.”64
Because the images of acupuncture anesthesia contained, by representing a
surgical operating theater, a picture of the mediatic perspective that was also
responsible for their global distribution, part of what was being represented back
to the West in these moments was not simply the fact of modern surgery in China
but China’s ability to organize its internal physical spaces in accordance with the
demands of modern ways of seeing. Within this context it is crucial finally to
acknowledge the major difference between acupuncture anesthesia and the kind
of anesthesia practiced in the West: in acupuncture anesthesia, the patient re-
mained awake. Though experiments in partial chemical anesthesia (absence of
feeling) and analgesia (absence of pain) produced through the use of epidural and
caudal anesthetics had taken place as early as the late nineteenth century (some-
times using a mixture of tap water and cocaine), the practice of spinal anesthesia
was only in the 1970s becoming commonplace in Western medicine.65 Though
63
Yang, “Refuting Antonioni’s Slanders against Linhsien County,” 13.
64
Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham, Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture
and Moxa (Cambridge, 1980), 5 (emphasis mine). Celestial Lancets is the best review of the historical
moment at which acupuncture anesthesia seemed to hold the greatest medical promise. Lu and
Needham review all of the objections raised by Western observers to the “magic” of acupuncture
anesthesia, including the possibility that the patients were merely under hypnosis (see 226). Their
discussion of acupuncture anesthesia for major surgery appears on 218–30.
65
For a history of early experiments in the use of epidural anesthesia, see Mark G. Mandabach,
“The early history of spinal anesthesia,” The History of Anesthesia: Proceedings of the Fifth International
Symposium on the History of Anesthesia, eds. José C. Diz, Avelino Franco, Douglas R. Bacon, Joseph
Rupreht, and Julián Alvarez (New York, 2002).
acupuncture’s production of local analgesia without unconsciousness did not,

therefore, demonstrate the presence of the inconceivable, it did open the possi-
bility that a longstanding goal of modern Western medical practice could be
reached by a means whose cultural and scientific pedigree did not correspond to
anything recognized as legitimate in the West. Some measure of the cultural
shock provoked by this possibility was the insistent reference to the acupuncture
treatment as “anesthesia,” even though, as some American scientists noted,
because “in no instance is sensation totally abolished or consciousness disturbed,”
the proper term was analgesia or hypalgesia (diminution of pain).66 That both
Buck and Sontag use the word “anesthesia” to describe the procedures they saw
suggests that the cultural work done by acupuncture anesthesia had to do as
much with its putative equivalence to Western medicine as to its production of a
Chinese alternative to it.67
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Riboud photograph is not, therefore,
that the woman is anesthetized by acupuncture, but that a medical assistant is
feeding her slices of fruit, an act that deftly illustrates both her lack of pain and her
subjective consciousness. Patients being operated on under acupuncture anesthesia
did not have to become “inert matter” for the surgeon to penetrate; rather, the
surgical penetration of the body could proceed alongside the subject’s remaining
self-aware as subject. The fact that the patient’s subjective desires could be met
without interrupting the operation suggests that subjectivity, rather than becoming
an obstacle to the surgical work, could co-exist with or even abet it.68 Acupuncture
anesthesia as it was represented in Western popular culture seemed to offer the
possibility not simply of an equal “alternative” to chemically induced sleep but, far
more than that, a new form of pain management that could undo the anesthetizing,
“objectifying” effects of Western modernity by allowing the subject to be anesthe-
tized while still remaining a subject; dissociating the body from its own pain could
occur without dissociating the body from its sense of self.69
66
American Acupuncture Anesthesia Study Group, 3.
67
The authors of the American Acupuncture Anesthesia Study Group—which, you’ll notice,
included “Anesthesia” in its very name—preferred “hypalgesia,” which indicates a diminished (but not
eradicated) sensitivity to pain. In their study, Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham use the term
“analgesia,” though they note that “common usage, especially in Chinese foreign-language publishing,
calls it anaesthesia” (221nC).
68
By contrast: Buck-Morss quotes a nineteenth-century surgeon who notes with satisfaction that
under anesthesia “the patient lies a tranquil, passive subject, instead of struggling and perhaps uttering
piteous cries and moans” (28).
69
Pernick notes that in the years between 1846 and the end of the century, some doctors and
some patients refused to use anesthesia in order to secure the patient’s active participation in the
Given the historical and formal connections between photographic vision and
modern surgery, acupuncture anesthesia opened the possibility that modernity
could be detached from the deadened, anesthetized aesthetic that it had seemed
naturally to require, the alternative medical modernity of the acupuncture opera-
tion crossing over to become an alternative aesthetic modernity as well. Images of
acupuncture anesthesia returned the camera’s look by showing the possibility of a
surgery without unconsciousness. Pain could be managed without making the
body the hyle of the subject. To Dürer’s question, What do you see?, a person
looking at a human being from this perspective would be able to recognize the
body and its person at the same time, in effect including the body, the material
substrate of the subject, in the field of perception and recognition.
In showing a surgery without total objectification, these images also showed a
cinematic look without photographic vision. And if vision could change—if
indeed China offered, as Sontag believed it did, the experience of cameras without
the experience of the photographic—then perhaps the world could have moder-
nity without pain, industrialism without the exploitation of labor (another dream
of the Cultural Revolutionary era), mass culture without the deadening effects of
overstimulation. What those photographs showed at the level of the image was a
new relationship between hyle and non-hyle, articulated explicitly through a body
that while no longer sensitive to pain nonetheless remained aware of itself and of
its desires, a body that could adopt an attitude toward its own pain that was
simultaneously aestheticized—able to view itself from a objectifying and anesthe-
tized distance—and “man-to-man,” in the sense that the patient could remain
awake to attend to the body as self, or to ignore it and eat fruit.70
The representations of acupuncture anesthesia did not, then, offer some kind
of primitive return to the premodern, in which the confrontation with pain
produced a fully engaged and articulated self as pain (and therefore no aesthetic
surgery, or to allow the patient to face, awake, the possibility of his or her death: “As late as 1862, it was
not uncommon to find surgeons who ‘expected the patient to assist in small operations,’ such as
probing wounds and removing bone fragments” (59). The unconscious patient was thus a potential
victim as well as the potential beneficiary of the “boon to suffering humanity” that was anesthesia’s
discovery; some worried that the “powerlessness of the anesthetized subject would lead not merely to
carelessness and disrespect but also to involuntary surgery and to unnecessary and experimental
operations” (59).
70
In some deeply ironic sense this resembles what Bataille saw in the photograph of his
“beautiful” young Chinese man, though the modernity Bataille overcame in his ecstatic communion
did not return, as it would in the photographs of Chinese surgeries, as yet more bland evidence for a
wealthier, more comfortable world.
or anesthetizing separation between agent, observer, and inert matter), catapult-

ing the self beyond modernity in a fantastic act of sacrifice. That was Bataille’s
model. Rather these images opened inside the field of modernity proper the
possibility of an accommodation between the hyle and body, hyle and image. In
these surgical “postcards,” temporality became a spectacle that showed Europe
the possibility of an “alternatively” modern future that would have to wait till the
late 1990s to appear as the fully conscious philosophical project of the proponents
of “Asian values.” The latter’s emphasis on the possibility of modernity without
social pain (individualism, divorce, drugs, crime) would reinscribe the fascina-
tion of these images into a more recognizable and more lasting political idiom.
7 Closures
Three Examples in Search of a Conclusion
Because kindness is only the projection of defeated self-love; because tenderness can originate
in perversity and tend towards violence; and because the real sense of another’s loss calques
upon a presentiment of the extinction of our own identity, we should worry not about
extending sympathy, but that it is already too disgracefully extended.
—Jonathan Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales,” Critical Inquiry 28
(Autumn 2001), 166
In the educational model of the body’s burden, I feel the pounding of my own enlarged heart.
—Shin Yu Pai, “Body Worlds,” EOAGH 4
I am the alpha and the omega, Jesus said (or didn’t say), trusting the metaphor of
a closed linear system to affirm his purchase on the infinite. Academic books, no
less than children of the divine, frame whole worlds between their openings and
closings. Their final sutures establish—like the alphabetic omega, but less pre-
dictably—the endpoint of a line that defines the story of the book. No
preface that is not also an opening to light, Eduardo Cadava writes; likewise no
conclusion that does not mark the shuttering of that aperture.1 What you see just
before the curtain falls frames (closes, discloses) the ambit of its captured
illuminations.
1
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J., 1997),
xvii.
246
CLOSURES 247
1. Sense of an Ending (I)
In 1983, the Austrian writer Peter Handke gave his newly published novel the title
Der Chinese des Schmerzes, a phrase that translates into English as The Chinaman
of Pain. The title’s somewhat bewildering reversal of subject and object pushes the
themes of The Hypothetical Mandarin to a figurative limit. There, at the limit, the
West’s historical concern with the suffering of Chinese people suddenly appears
on the other side of the genitive mirror, presenting readers with the anticipation
of a radically different mode of belonging.
As if explicitly to frustrate the sense of curiosity and wonder produced by its
evocative title, Der Chinese des Schmerzes has almost nothing to do with China at
all. In it, a middle-aged first-person narrator moves through a Salzburg brimming
with infrequently expressed and ultimately impotent violence, hopping on and
off buses, attending a card game, and wandering along rocky paths in the
mountains outside the city, where he kills a man by hitting him in the head
with a stone. He eventually comes home and tells his son a story, which seems to
be the story of the novel. Along the way, the narrator has a sexual encounter with
a woman he knows, or seems to know, in an upstairs room of the airport hotel. As
she leaves, he asks her, not without desperation—“I was in need of being
described a little”—to give him a portrait of himself.
Then she replied: “You don’t seem to be wholly present; you breathe
discontent. You’re kind of run-down. I desire you but I don’t trust you.
You have something on your conscience; not theft, or you’d be on the run.
It’s plain that you are outside ordinary law, and it makes you suffer in a
way. I don’t trust you, and I do. You are like the man in the doorway.
Though very ill, he went to see a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at
length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tensed eyes became slits,
framed in their sockets as by sharply ground lenses. ‘Goodbye, my
suffering Chinaman,’ said his friend.” (‘Auf Widersehen, mein Chinese des
Schmerzes!’ sagte der Freund.)2
In someone else’s novel it would be possible to reconstruct from this episode a

coherent rationale for the connection it asserts between Chineseness and
suffering, in this context justified only by the fact that the friend’s attempt to
2
Peter Handke, Der Chinese des Schmerzes (Berlin, 1983), 217–18; translated as Across by Ralph
Manheim (New York, 1986), 116–17. Further references in the text to the English edition.
smile reproduces one of the key physiognomic features of the Chinese racial
stereotype.3 But since Handke’s strategy throughout Der Chinese des Schmerzes
(and indeed in most of his fiction) is to provide the signifiers of interpretive depth
without ever connecting them to appropriate signifieds, I am tempted instead to
say that the scene produces interpretive desire (“why does the friend call him der
Chinese? Why does this become the title of the novel?) precisely in order to leave it
unsatisfied. The sense of pregnant but empty meaningfulness that follows the
reading of such a passage, so typical of Handke’s work, presents a reference to
China that has failed to connect in any significant way to the poetic or narrative
coherence of a social world.
That may be the reason that, when Ralph Manheim translated Der Chinese des
Schmerzes into English in 1986, he changed its title to Across.4 The shift has the
effect of erasing the extradiegetic quality of the phrase “my suffering Chinaman”
in the English edition, whose readers will instead spend their time attending to
the novel’s various crossings (literal and metaphorical: bridges, translations, and
the like). I take Manheim’s assertion of the title’s meaninglessness—itself depen-
dent on a completely reasonable reading of the novel as having nothing to do with
Chinamen of suffering—as a confirmation, or reconfirmation, of its vital impor-
tance: the fact that its presence in the title can disappear without comment is
precisely what grants the phrase, when compared to all the other features of
the book, an unusual prominence. The Chinaman’s erasure thus reproduces at
the material level involving translations, book sales, and newspaper reviews the
figurative function it had served in the novel itself, its combination of significance
and insignificance—of insignificant significance—in the history of the book’s
international publication essentially mirroring its mimetic role in the work to
which it (sometimes) gives itself as title.
Ending this book at this point, with Handke, would suggest that the historical
drift of the discourse on China, sympathy, and suffering reaches in the Austria of the
3
From this point, one might move on to the four other mentions of China in the book. In one of
them, the feverish narrator dreams of a Chinese restaurant in an airport on the moon, in which human
beings are slaughtered for food in front of a live audience of diners and tourists (98–99). In another, a
bus driver says to the narrator, who has been making an especially verbose farewell, “Good night,
Mr. Chinaman (Gute nacht, Herr Chinese)!” (81); there are mentions of Chinese limestone and Far
Eastern calligraphy (19; 38). The first two instances seem at least to refer us to historical forms of
Chinese stereotype, of which the cannibalistic violence, the verbosity, might be the extended edges.
Nothing else in the novel seems to have anything to do with China at all.
4
Ralph Manheim’s view was apparently not shared by the translators of either the French or the
Spanish editions, who published the novel as Le Chinois de la douleur and El Chino del dolor,
respectively.
CLOSURES 249
early 1980s a kind of apocalyptic finality, a transformation into the realm of the pure
idea. Though such a claim need not imply that the “suffering Chinaman” in
Handke’s novel closes a historical trajectory that leads inevitably from high econo-
mic mediation (George Henry Mason, Peter Parker) to contentless figuration
(Georges Bataille, Handke), the choice of Handke would establish one endpoint
of a logical continuum leading from the material to the ideal. Between the intense
economic and imperialist animations of Edmund Scott’s torture of a Chinese
goldsmith in Java in the late sixteenth century and Handke’s virtual, or virtually
empty, linkage of Chineseness and suffering, one could then plot the coordinates of
every other example in the book. From such a perspective, Der Chinese des Schmerzes
would function as the high point of the Chinese “example-effect,” its reference to
China appearing in the mode of total unimportance or arbitrary disappearance
(“well of course Handke didn’t mean anything by the word ‘Chinese’! That’s why we
changed the novel’s title . . . ”) confirming the nearly total emptiness of the Chinese
example, even as it confirmed its vital and unrelenting plenitude.
2. Sense of an Ending (II)
Other closures are possible. Consider, against Handke, the biography of the
Chinese modernist Lu Xun, whose decision to become a writer turned on his
being shown, while a young medical student in Japan, a photograph of the
execution of a Chinese spy. The scene appears for the first time in the preface
to A Call to Arms (Nahan, 1922):
I do not know what advanced methods are now used to teach microbiolo-
gy, but at that time lantern slides were used to show the microbes; and if
the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of national
scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese
war [1904–05], so there were many war films, and I had to join in the
clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students. It
was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one day I saw a film
showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood
around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apa-
thetic. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a
spy working for the Russians, who was to have his head cut off by the
Japanese military as a warning to others, while the Chinese beside him had
come to enjoy the spectacle.
Before the term was over I had left for Tokyo, because after this film I
felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a
weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can
only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles; and
it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness. The most
important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at the
time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to
promote a literary movement.5
This passage is among the most widely discussed in twentieth-century Chinese

literary history. In its movement from medicine to literature, from spectatorship
to writing, passivity to activity, and expatriate identity to national identification,
we see the socio-cultural outlines of the Chinese intellectual’s early twentieth-
century turn to modernity articulated as a project of national spiritual restoration
through literature. That this project appears for the first time in Lu Xun’s
autobiography as the result of his passive spectatorship of a scene explicitly not
directed toward him—and that he turns that scene, or forces it to detour, so that
it breaches him in a particular and particularly productive address—suggests how
intimately the task of the postcolonial intellectual in early twentieth-century
China was caught up in a doubled relation to violence and representationality.
The self-consciously modernizing themes of Lu Xun’s narration—his frustra-
tion with the Chinese audience’s “secret sense of carnival,” thus his privileging of
sympathy, his distaste for pleasure in cruelty, his rejection of public executions as
expressions of state power—are guised, also, in an explicitly modern form.6 As
many scholars have observed, the passage’s arrangement of shifting spectatorial
5
Lu Xun, “Preface,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing,
1978), 2–3. A slightly more “American” and contemporary translation is William A. Lyell’s, in Lu Xun,
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Honolulu, 1990). Lydia Liu also translates this passage, retaining
more of Lu Xun’s sentence structure (the Yang translation combines a few sentences) in Translingual
Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, 1995),
61–62; see also Rey Chow’s modified version in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography,
and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York, 1995), 4–5. For a lengthier treatment of this scene
within the context of a biographical-critical reading of Lu Xun, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the
Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington, 1987); Lee’s translation of this passage appears on 16–17.
6
David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in
Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, 2004), 22. Chow argues in Primitive Passions that the shift from
image to writing in Lu Xun’s anecdote represents the conversion of “an older, pre-modern model of
discipline and punishment by physical torture and visual spectacle to a ‘progressive,’ because more
efficient, notion of discipline and punishment by education” (18). Hence the importance of writing as
a mechanism for national transformation—the question is not of getting rid of the disciplinary
CLOSURES 251
positions, with all its play of engagement with and detachment from reality,
produced a complex of interpretation and intervention that became “one of the
major issues of modern Chinese critical realism.”7 But the triangular narrative
structure Lu Xun articulates—in which he opposes himself to the cheering
Japanese students, and to the Chinese audience that has come to enjoy the
execution’s spectacle—also recalls the mediated narrative gaze of Bertrand
Russell’s description of the dog run over in the street, and the ethnographic
knowledge arranged by the photographer of Bataille’s beloved image. Part of my
argument has been that this spectatorial relationship to suffering is itself the
structural form of a certain modernity and that the implication of the reporter or
viewer in any such scene—the degree to which any disapproving report on the
cruelty of others depends on the viewer’s simultaneous disavowal of and
participation in the scene of violence—discloses the compromised position of
the modern narrator as such. Lu Xun’s production of such a position occurred as
part of his lifelong dialogue with and transformation of Western texts on the
Chinese character, including Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, which Lu
Xun read in Japanese translation, and Russell’s The Problem of China, whose
chapter on Chinese character appeared in Dongfang zazhi in early 1922, the same
year Lu Xun wrote the Nahan preface.8
Though this example does not end the chronological story I tell about the
history of the perception of the Chinese relationship to suffering, or confirm
the assertion that something culturally or racially particular to China is respon-
sible for that relation, it marks the movement of that discourse into the Chinese
context, where, thanks partly to the influence of Lu Xun, it became a vital
ideological feature of the history of Chinese modernity. This discursive shift, in
which a Chinese writer begins to pose questions about the Chinese relation to
sympathy that had been the province of a more general Western imperialism,
constitutes something like a return: the final step in a diasporic movement
whereby the traveling question arrives at home and embraces, as though for the
first time, its “native” origins. The force of the Lu Xun example would in such a
conception be to close a geographic circle, so that a discourse that began, more or
less, in the relation between Mason and the Macartney embassy—and indeed in
mechanism of the state altogether but of “modernizing” the state by converting its disciplinary
mechanisms from “hard” to “soft” ones.
7
Wang, 24.
8
For a lengthy discussion of these important moments in the translation and internationaliza-
tion of the concept of modernity, see chapter 1 of Liu’s Translingual Practice.
the sense of a Chinese “failure” to be modern—would find an almost natural

ending point in the apparent agreement to that position by the most modern of
modern Chinese writers.
But to gesture toward such a closure, and thus to think of the Lu Xun episode
as a “return,” requires us to make two mistakes: first, to imagine that a difference
in intended addressees makes no difference to the social and philosophical
meaning of a literary text, and second, to believe that “China” was the true origin
of the discourse I address. On the first count, it is enough to consider that, as
Lydia Liu has noted, the drama of violence represented in the scene “also unfolds
at the level of reading where the reader is shocked to discover that she or he is
implicated in the violence of representation by being induced to play the role of a
witness to the same spectacle of horror” the scene describes.9 The difference
between Lu Xun’s narration of such a scene and one by say, Russell, is that the
former, directing itself toward a Chinese audience, aims to allow both Lu Xun and
his readers to “emerge as subject and agent of their own history,” and not simply
to confirm for a Western readership the well-known cruelty of the Chinese.10
As for the second mistake, which takes “China” for the origin of the discourse
I have described, my position is, rather, that the discursive network built up
around the question of a Chinese relation to pain is most at home not in China
but in the ecliptic: the virtually universal, virtually local figure that describes the
cultural limit-space out of which that network seems to appear (and whose
function is, finally, to be the site of that apparent appearance). This is as much
as to say it is at home nowhere, or that it is at home only in the relation. Since the
ecliptic marks, as I have said, the appearance of the global from the perspective of
the local, the home to which it refers its Western readers will of necessity appear
definitive—as definitive, in fact, as the globe itself—even though it is, from any
other perspective, completely arbitrary. Its uncanny homeliness rests in the
relation it establishes between those two perspectives, just as the perception of
Chinese suffering that appears in the story of the Chinese execution that provides
Lu Xun’s career with its retroactive inauguration lies neither in the China to
which it refers, nor in the West that is site to its extensive reproduction and
circulation, but in the historical and narrative relation between those two
epistemological and social forms.
9
10
CLOSURES 253
3. Sense of an Ending (III)
Other closures are possible. Consider, against Handke and Lu Xun, the appear-
ance since 1995 in the privileged cities of the globe of large-scale exhibitions of
plasticized and skinless corpses demonstrating the internal functions and struc-
tures of the human body. Usually open to the muscle, sometimes to the bone,
sometimes reduced to anthropomorphic collections of vascular networks, placed
in yoga poses or arrested in the middle of some athletic endeavour, occasionally
offering up an ironic commentary on their own bizarre ontological status, the
corpses recall the extravagances of Andreas Vesalius’s sixteenth-century De hu-
mani corporis fabrica, whose anatomical drawings leavened their moments of
genuine instruction with the occasional dark joke (a skeleton leans on a shovel,
with which it has just dug its own grave; this latter, then, an early example of the
genre it would take the twentieth century to understand as “edutainment”).
The “plastinated” bodies featured in American museums of natural history
first appeared in a Tokyo exhibition called Body Worlds. By 2006 this exhibition
and its successors had attracted over 20 million visitors and generated more than
$200 million in major cities across the United States, Europe, and East Asia.11 A
number of copycat exhibits with titles like “The Universe Within” (San Fran-
cisco), “Mysteries of the Human Body” (South Korea), and “Cuerpos entrañ-
ables” (Spain), followed shortly behind the success of the original Body Worlds,
the phenomenon threatening to surpass the commercial success of wildly popular
exhibitions on the artifacts of the Titanic in the late 1990s and to exceed even the
1980s’ craze for shows featuring robotic dinosaurs.12 So the recent history of the
public’s museal fascination takes us from the animated fossil record to the ocean
floor to the self: as though the past brought to life in the first two cases, replete
with the important pleasures of seeing and touching objects once seen and
touched by the dead, had been elevated to an apothetic prolepsis in which what
11
The “plastination” process was invented by Gunter von Hagens in the 1970s and involves
replacing body water and fat with liquid silicone rubber and other synthetic polymers. Von Hagens’
Institute for Plastination, which I discuss below, is responsible for Body Worlds.
12
For a longer discussion of these exhibits in the context of the museum industry, see David
Barboza, “China Turns Out Mummified Bodies for Displays,” The New York Times, Aug. 8 2006,
also available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/business/worldbusiness/08bodies.html?
ei=5088&en=672da5787d998daf&ex=1312689600&partner=rssnyt&pagewanted=print. Barboza’s video
report is available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqKvYUO7C7w. On the arc of the
dinosaur’s popularity and its general cultural meaning, see W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book:
The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago, 1998).
the museum brings to life is the visitor’s inevitable future, this nearly literal
animation hardly troubled by the fact that such a future quite explicitly entails
the visitor’s becoming a corpse.
If the educational materials surrounding these exhibitions are to be believed,
these displays do not, however, address the future but the present, particularly
when it comes to showing a desiccated, blackened, smoker’s lung or the liver of a
heavy drinker, each individuated organ reminding those still and temporarily
among the living to care for the precious cargo that lies beneath their coverings of
fur and skin. Likewise, the whole bodies, so often posed to demonstrate athletic
feats, encourage through their alienating exposition an awareness of the “miracle”
and “wonder” of the human machine, while recalling the fragile, complex work-
ings of the visitors’ own personal embodiments. The hyle of the body has become
identical with the work of art that plays across its surfaces.
The identification that allows the bodies in the exhibit to speak of and finally
for the visitor’s body depends heavily on the stripping of the corpses’ skin:
chemistry has removed the marks that would have allowed someone to assign
these nameless, faceless physiognomies to some cultural habitus or individuated
personality. The resulting hypernudity of muscle and organ, vein and bone,
swathes the corpses in an anonymity so sad and modest that it verges on
greatness. Small wonder that the second and third Body Worlds exhibitions
draw for their biological material on corpses donated by visitors to the first
one: to see these bodies is to want—for some people, and some of the time—to
become one of them, to share in their lasting, celebrated, permanence, their
“uniquely secular, material form of immortality.”13 Immortality and change for
the living as well as the dead: the exhibit “profoundly changed my attitudes
towards my body, towards life and death,” says one visitor cited by Megan
Stern. “I feel myself in a different way now, more intensely.”14 Thus is the
external face reunited with what the exhibition’s publicity materials call the
“interior” face made of muscle and bone. This reconciliation between inside
13
Megan Stern, “Shiny, Happy People: ‘Body Worlds’ and the Commodification of Health,”
Radical Philosophy 118 (March/April 2003), also available online at http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/
default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=11213.
14
As you might imagine, the exhibits have also been met with protests, including ones from
religious leaders, arguing that they are deeply disrespectful to the dead. The bioethicist Ruth Guyer,
speaking on National Public Radio, for instance, argues that the “bodies were in perverse, unnatural,
mocking poses,” and that visitors “yukking it up with off-color comments” indicated that “we have
forgotten our moral obligations to the dead” (“A Bioethicist Takes a Peek at ‘Body Worlds’,” http://
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5640183).
CLOSURES 255
Fig 7.1 Gaspar Becerra, A

flayed man holding his
own skin, 1556.
and outside appears in allegorized form in the exhibit itself, in the posed corpse of
a man who strides forward, bare and bold, his entire skin held high in his right
hand: a deliberate imitation, also, and not for nothing, of a sixteenth-century
anatomical drawing by Gaspar Becerra.
In the intensity of the feelings provoked by the figure the exhibit calls “The
Skin Man,” I read the presence of a mode of belonging to what Mark Seltzer has
called “wound culture,” in which the “collective spectacle of torn and open bodies
and persons” emblematized by the obsession with serial killers and horror movies
becomes a privileged and literalizing metaphor for the more general opening
toward otherness required by the public sphere. In wound culture, Seltzer writes,
“the opening of relation to others (the ‘sympathetic’ social bond)” appears as
coterminous with “the traumatic collapse of boundaries between self and other (a
yielding of identity to identification)”—meaning that the entry into culture
occurs on the basis of a psychic experience defined in terms of an originary and
Fig 7.2 The Skin Man,

1995. Gunther von
Hagens, Institute for
Plastination, Heidelberg,
Germany, www.body-
worlds.com.
CLOSURES 257
violent tearing open of the self.15 It is the production of this awareness as social
fact that makes the “public sphere” of wound culture so pathological, because all
of its participants depend for their putative equality on the fantasy that such an
equality—and, thus, the origin of community—stems from an originary wound-
ing to a self-enclosed and self-sustaining self that exists prior to that public
sphere.16 Hence we are all victims, and hence there is no power and no fascination
in contemporary society like those we give to and have for the wounded and the
bereaved; as Wendy Brown puts it, “identity structured by this ethos becomes
deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuage the pain of its
powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing.”17
If the structure of belonging to and engaging in the contemporary social world
is defined as the function of an originary and inescapable violence (rather than as,
more optimistically, the welcome healing of a festering and negative solitude), as
Seltzer suggests, then we might understand exhibits like Body Worlds as attempts
to depathologize the nature of the wound, normalizing it as the kernel of a
collective identity whose “public” has expanded to the limits of the human
species. From this perspective, the tremendous violence done to the corpses-
become-bodies in Body Worlds is the material precursor of the spectators’ figura-
tive identification with them, the violence done to dead bodies imagining avant la
lettre the woundedness of live ones. “I feel myself in a different way now, more
intensely,” is the mark of just such a recognition, in which empathy with the
opened-up body encourages the feeling that I, like you, am wounded. The sinews
and muscles holding me together, bound by the premonition of their future
shattering: so identification leads back to identity. The marketing materials’
reminder of “what we are: naturally fragile in a mechanized world” ties the visitor
to the corpse.18
15
Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Life and Death in America’s Wound Culture (New York, 1998), 258.
16
Hence, as Seltzer argues in Serial Killers, the obsessive return in both real life and the news and
entertainment media to scenes of crime, to scenes of bloody murder, to forensic investigation, and so on.
17
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J., 1995), 70.
18
This and other citations from Body Worlds publicity materials draw on information at http://
www.bodyworlds.com. As far as identification goes, its intensity explains the reason that so many
visitors to the exhibits respond by immediately signing up to become donors to them. As for the
mechanized world, these lines from the exhibition catalog remind us that recent conceptions of the
“natural” body draw heavily on its conceived relation to the “mechanized” world it inhabits, a cultural
habit whose beginnings in obsessions with automata travels through the early twentieth century’s
discovery, in work like Frederick Taylor’s, of the “human motor,” and beyond that on to the historically
belated awareness of what N. Katherine Hayles has called the body’s “posthuman” condition, the latter
having turned out to have been with us all along. On these topics see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium:
This is true at least in theory. In practice, the unity of this “we” proves harder
to sustain, largely because the mute and vulnerable corpses have—despite the
exhibits’ best intentions—continued to “speak” from beyond their open graves,
thereby dislocating the identificatory structure that depends on the presumption
of their universality. And what they have said is this: we were once, the vast
majority of us, inhabitants of the People’s Republic of China.
This fact owes something to the cheapness of cadavers in the PRC, something to
the large number of trained anatomists there, and something to its loose regula-
tion of the trade in dead bodies before 2006—all of which have come together to
create a major body preservation industry in the northeastern Chinese city of
Dalian. None of this would matter much, however, if the provenance of the corpses
used in exhibitions had not caused human rights activists to claim that both
Gunter von Hagens (who operates Body Worlds) and Premier Exhibitions (Bodies
. . . The Exhibition) have used cadavers from the mentally ill and from executed
prisoners as material for their programs.19 Though the accusations have never
been proven, and though von Hagens won a lawsuit against Der Spiegel for
publishing them, the fact that both the Institute for Plastination and Premier
Exhibitions continue to obtain most of their cadavers and organs from China—
where at least ten body preservation factories have opened in recent years to meet
the worldwide demand for processed corpses—has meant that the provenance of
the bodies they put on display has become the necessary armature of an exhibi-
tion’s arrival in any new city: no newspaper article reviewing the exhibition is
Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley, 2000); Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambig-
uous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003); Anson Rabinbach’s The Human
Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, 1992); Martha Banta’s Taylored Lives:
Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, 1993), Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and
Machines (New York, 1992), as well as Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, 1999). As for Body Worlds, in 2003 von Hagens
“issued a public appeal in Britain seeking a terminally ill volunteer who would donate his body
to a ‘Futurehuman’ project. After the donor’s death, a TV station planned to film his plastination
and reconstruction as a ‘Futurehuman’ with ‘improvements’ to correct what von Hagens
considered flaws in human evolutionary design” (Russell Working, “Shock Value,” Chicago Tribune,
July 31, 2005, also available online at http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/
chi-0507310429jul31,1,3790747.story?page=2&coll=chi-health-utl.).
19
Adding to these accusations, Von Hagens and Premier Exhibitions have traded a number of
lawsuits around copyright and patent issues, at least partly because Premier’s major supplier in Dalian,
Sui Hongjin, used to manage von Hagens’ preservation facility. Both von Hagens and Premier have
suggested that the other is operating unethically in China; see Barboza and Stern, as well as Neda
Ulaby, “Origins of Exhibited Cadavers Questioned,” All Things Considered (National Public Radio),
Aug. 11 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5637687.
CLOSURES 259
complete without a mention of the disputed human rights charges, and in many
cities local organizations have staged protests against the organizers without, for
all their efforts, being able to stop the exhibitions themselves.20
Let us push a little harder on the ways in which the corpses’ Chineseness
interrupts the universalist and identificatory appeal to “wound culture” upon
which the exhibitions’ success depends. “From a cultural perspective, especially
since a number of the cadavers are from China, it feels like a gross violation,”
activist Bettie Luke told a newspaper reporter shortly before Bodies . . . The Exhi-
bition opened in Seattle. “The willful use of putting a body on indefinite display
like that condemns the soul to wander the netherworld with no chance to rest.”21
Luke’s objection, though reflecting personal beliefs, shows us how the corpses’
Chineseness persists beyond their processing and flaying, the grammar of their
posthumous torment relying on the structure of what they may have believed
when they were alive. In this persistence, one finds reproduced the very mimetic
impasse upon which the exhibitions depend for their pure and engrossing allure.
As the promotional material for Body Worlds insists, the fact that each of these
displayed bodies was once a unique individual is part of their collective appeal:
Every human being is unique. Humans reveal their individuality not only
through the visible exterior, but also through the interior of their bodies, as
20
In London, for instance, members of Pity II, a group formed to protest the use of infant and
fetal body parts without parental consent, demanded that the exhibition be shut down; in Amsterdam,
the opening of Bodies . . . The Exhibition “was greeted by 21 white crosses on the sidewalk with the
words ‘Unknown Chinese’ written on them,” according to Aaron Ginsburg, who runs a website
devoted to stopping body exhibitions (<http://dignityinboston.googlepages.com/presscoverage>).
As Linda Schulte-Sasse has remarked, criticism directed against the exhibitions in Europe—where
von Hagens has been labeled a “speculator with death” and compared to Joseph Mengele—has been
far more vociferous than in the United States (“Advise and Consent: On the Americanization of Body
Worlds,” BioSocieties 1 [2006], 370–71.). Part of this difference, she argues, rests on the fact that in the
United States, the exhibitions have appeared and been authorized by their museumification: not only
their literal appearance in museum spaces (and not exhibition halls or converted slaughterhouses, as in
Europe), but the general shift in lighting and presentation that such spaces provide (in some shows,
she notes, the bodies are contextualized by appearing alongside anatomical drawings “dating back to
the Middle Ages” [373]).
21
Cited in Winda Benedetti, “Education or Freak Show? ‘Bodies . . . The Exhibition Cashes in on
Our Own Curiosity,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sep. 28 2006, also available online at http://seattlepi.
nwsource.com/lifestyle/286689_bodies28.html. Bettie Luke’s comment is mirrored by that of another
Chinese-American, Fiona Ma, a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, who told Russell
Working of the Chicago Tribune that in “Chinese culture they have great respect for the dead and
superstition about dead bodies and death. And so I know they would never consent to have their
bodies displayed like this, in such a manner.”
each body is distinctly different from any other. Position, size, shape, and
structure of skeleton, muscles, nerves, and organs determine our “interior
face.” It would be impossible to convey this anatomical individuality with
models, for a model is nothing more than an interpretation. All models
look alike and are, essentially, simplified versions of the real thing.
Though any distinction made between the unique and “uninterpreted” quality of
the bodies in Body Worlds must falter on the fact that they are not only deliber-
ately posed, but individually signed by von Hagens, the rhetoric presented
nonetheless grasps something crucial about how the exhibitions operate. The
generic “humanity” they represent through the exhibit as a whole (fragile before
the mechanized world, and so forth) depends for its strength on its never actually
appearing in any particular body. Only in being exactly as we “are,” individually,
do we represent our belonging to a community composed of other beings who are
each, in their own way, exactly as they “are” as well. Whereas in models, the drive
to produce a generic singularity eliminates, paradoxically, the very representative
qualities that the models aim to reproduce. It is this strange combination of
uniqueness and representativeness—the fact that the bodies become, in some
sense, most representative when they expose their individuality—that allows the
corpses in the exhibitions to retain the forms of historical embeddedness and
belonging that motivates the cultural anxiety about their origins.22 That the bodies
come from China thus offers something like a return of the national and cultural
particularity whose repression grounds the idealized conception of the exhibitions
as being about a universally “human” anatomy defined by a generic vulnerability
to an equally generic machine age.23 The racial and national origin of the corpses,
their circulation in a network of exchange that owes a great deal to differences in
the national regulation of the sale of human cadavers and to the cost of certain
forms of skilled labor, matters enough that the anatomical knowledge these
exhibitions spread appears alongside a discourse about the methods of its acqui-
sition and propagation, the two discourses occasionally intertwining as commu-
nity activists respond to the controversy by reminding the viewing public
22
Compare, for instance, the history and circulation of the body exhibitions with the embarras-
sing and violent modes of display forced upon Saartjie Baartman, known as the “Hottentot Venus,” or
any of the other people of African, South American, or Pacific descent forced to “perform” their racial
and cultural difference for audiences in the privileged European cities of the nineteenth century.
23
Imagine, instead, if we got an exhibit of a man who had died of cirrhosis of the liver, with a
narrative explanation that he had liked to drink because it kept his mind off the fact that he had lost his
job when his factory was sold to foreign investors.
CLOSURES 261
that the displayed bodies are, despite the removal of the “exterior” faces that would
testify to this fact, still ethnically and nationally Chinese.24
Whereas in other examples we have seen the ecliptic quality of the reference to
China emerge from the internal representational structures of the formulations
themselves—the Chineseness of the mandarin, for instance, organizing from
within the frame of the hypothetical as a linguistic micro-genre the shift from
politics to philosophy that rendered his Chineseness irrelevant—in this context
the ecliptic appearing and disappearing of Chineseness at the limit of the human
operates in the gap between the corpses’ representational function and their
material substance. The appeal to a universal humanity made by the bodies as
representations of a norm (the norm of uniqueness) thus oscillates in a tenuous
dialectic with the fact of their physical provenance. The history of the bodies’
production as artifacts interrupts the mimetic effects of their representationality.
The woundedness of these pseudo-corpses appears simultaneously as a feature of
a universally human state of affairs and as a particular act of violence done to
human subjects presumed not to have consented to their transformation into art
objects. (In this sense, the exhibition repeats some of the tropes of Edward
Steichen’s now-notorious “Family of Man” exhibition at the Metropolitan Muse-
um of Art in 1955.25)
Recalling Seltzer’s argument that in wound culture the violated physical
boundary figures “the opening of relation to others” conceived explicitly as the
sympathetic “social bond,” it thus seems possible to suggest that the accusation of
human rights abuses piled upon the cadaver exhibitions must be thought of as
part of a much larger complex—one that includes the exhibitions, their peda-
gogical and publicity materials, the modes of their production and circulation,
and the journalistic and activist armature that surrounds them—whose final
determinations belong to the tripartite field of sympathy, economy, and mimesis
that has organized this study. The sympathetic bond opened up by this complex
would then refer us to the more general problem of an opening to otherness
enacted through and represented as trauma, one highly dependent on the circu-
lation of persons inside a field of capital production and exchange. The fact that
24
The ethnic component is clear enough in Luke’s comments. As for the national one, here is
activist Aaron Ginsburg, also in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “China is not a nation of laws, and any
assurances that the bodies were legally obtained is meaningless” (Benedetti).
25
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 100–03, for the classic
critique of the exhibition; see also Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s
America (Albuquerque, 1995).
the bodies retain their history—and indeed, for some activists, their cultural
background—across the veil of death recalls once again the troubled divide
between the Kantian inner worth and the subjection of life to the simplifications
of market pricing: the very divide in which Balzac’s hypothetical mandarin also
interferes.
The nearly total woundedness of the Chinese subjects in these “body worlds,”
now grasped as a physical allegory of the sympathetic opening to others, thus
returns us to the always-deferred future of the universal human subject, whose
fate it is to appear in the world always as the imperfect analogue of its ideal. But it
also reminds us how frequently modern thought encounters and measures the
universal against the global, the latter functioning as the flawed yardstick of the
former’s pretensions toward the infinite.26 To this point, one might observe that,
in the case of Body Worlds at least, the realm of circulation for the bodies’ ecliptic
Chineseness no longer follows the geographic logic that has structured so much
of this book. The exhibitions’ movement through an international cityscape that
places Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei alongside New York, Cologne, and
Mexico City suggests that the discourse network captured by the figure of
the hypothetical mandarin has in the contemporary moment been disrupted by
the new forms of production and circulation that shape the uneven geography of
late capital—and thus that shifts in the shape of the “globe” as an imaginary will
have their effects, also, on the universals that attempt to account for it.
Ending at this point would thus gesture toward the occlusion of one aspect of
the discourse it has been The Hypothetical Mandarin’s task to describe, since the
horizontal alignment between the East and the West that governed earlier exam-
ples in this book now seems to have been surpassed by globalization’s new
arrangements of space: capitalography subsuming the older geographies. Though
this difference seems on the surface to presage a radical shift in the nature of the
sympathetic discourse outlined so far, it may also be the case that that discourse’s
coherent structure can survive the loss of one or more of its major thematic
features, and that changes in those features will simply indicate the kind of quasi-
evolutionary changes that allow any cultural formation to retain a structural
coherence and vitality over time. These shifts—never exactly closures—suggest
that the possibility of transformation or revision is in fact a crucial feature of any
discourse coherent enough to generate the impression of a singularity. So, that at
26
I owe his formulation to Russ Castronvo, who said, “the global is revealed as the imperfect
translation of the universal” in “How Does Democracy Taste?,” a lecture delivered at the Huntington
Library, San Marino, Calif., May 18, 2007.
CLOSURES 263
the far end of the imagination, one can think the possibility that the discourse
outlined in this book will remain viable beyond the literal presence of the Chinese
example: even if some day all the plastinated corpses are those of European
volunteers, and all the imaginary mandarins come from Latin America, the social
forms to which they refer will retain some fossil traces of their origins in the
West’s geopolitical encounter with the whole, unwounded otherness it has called
“China.” In that originality readers of the future will discern, if they are careful,
the disappearing appearance of the material substrate from which the universality
of the human birthed itself in this age, and which it consumed in the moment of
birthing. Like the Chineseness of Balzac’s mandarin—itself a largely ignored
feature of that particular hypothetical arrangement of life and capital—the
Chineseness of the corpses in these exhibitions shows that it is only in the
encounter between the universal ideal and the disavowed physical or linguistic
material of its elaboration that the modern recognizes itself as modern. Even
though the form of that recognition remains, in most cases, largely unrecognized.
4. Toward Sympaesthetics
Alexander Broadie has remarked the resemblance between Adam Smith’s empha-
sis on the mutuality of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the
process of “truck, barter, and exchange” that forms a cornerstone of The Wealth of
Nations.27 To this observation, we need only adduce David Marshall’s comment
that sympathy is “structured by theatrical dynamics that . . . depend on people to
represent themselves as tableaux, spectacles, and texts before others” in order to
suggest how closely the identifications on which sympathy depends rely, both in
practice and in theory, on a notion of “exchange” that includes representational
and economic dimensions.28 The hypothetical of the mandarin is the fictional
codification of that relationship, whose particular history has unfolded from the
opening pages of this book.
Sympathy’s economic dimensions, the degree to which an entire relation to the
suffering of the Chinese was historically caught up with a set of mercantile
exchanges and apprehensions of globalizing labor markets, were most carefully
27
Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006), 178.
28
David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary
Shelley (Chicago, 1988), 5 (emphasis mine).
traced in the first few chapters. There, I showed how the notion of sympathetic
exchange as a feature of economic exchange forced a generic violation in the
structure of William Miller’s typological book series, and I suggested that the
texts’ concealment of that violation in the “open” (which I compared to Poe’s
purloined letter) told us something about the difficulty of establishing the
connection between European sympathy and the China trade, as well as the
profound necessity for it. I followed the Mason chapter with a discussion of
the medical missionary project’s physical reliance on the economic wars fought
between Britain and China in the mid-1800s, and that, in turn, with an analysis of
the effects of coolie labor on one especially unusual piece of late nineteenth-
century American fiction, each of which, I showed, adopted a structure of feeling
that revealed the connection between sympathetic exchange, suffering, and
transnational flows of goods and people.
The resemblances among these texts, and indeed between them and the
material in the later chapters, are what led me to refer (at the end of the
introduction) to their complexity as “holomorphic,” a word which in mathemat-
ics refers to a function whose “character is preserved over the whole of the plane
which is not at infinity.”29 As the individual case studies in the chapters have
shown, the “character” preserved over the historical course that takes us from
1790 (the date of the sixth edition of Smith’s Moral Sentiments) to the present has
appeared in a wide range of genres (anecdote, novel, case study, watercolor,
photograph, sculpture) and affective modes (indifference, compassion, silence,
panic, appreciation), not to mention historical circumstances and geographical
locations. But these differences have not seriously deranged the structural simi-
larity that gives the examples what they have in common, that makes them in
some serious historical sense a matter not of accident but of ideology. It is the role
of that ideological structure as an expression of the history of Western thinking
about China and modernity that this book has pursued, with the goal of forcing a
recognition of its continuing presence in contemporary debates about the future
of universals, economic and political relationships between the West and China,
and indeed the long-term subjective orientation of a relentlessly globalized and
globalizing planet.
It would not do, however, to push the holomorphic envelope too far. The
crucial difference between a mathematical function and its expressions, on one
29
As Andrew Forsyth put it in 1893, in Theory of functions of a complex variable, cited in the
Oxford English Dictionary under “holomorphic, a., 2.”
CLOSURES 265
hand, and the kind of cultural formation I discuss here, on the other, is that in the
case of the former the precedence of the function over the expression is natural,
while in the latter the function only appears retroactively, as the idealized form to
which a series of expressions might be said to refer. Though the reconstruction of
that function has occupied much of the project, I wish to emphasize that
whatever structure has emerged from that labor is very much a fiction, showing
the imaginary historical form of something that only ever comes to light in a
series of essentially virtual instances. Because cultural forms, unlike mathematical
expressions, are overdetermined, they are subject to a number of overlapping and
competing causalities whose total contributions to the happening of any object or
event do not obey a logic that allows for the assignment of percentages of
responsibility, or for the easy extrication of a single causal chain from the raveled
whole. My introductory discussion of the example-effect meant to admit the fact
of this overdetermination into the field of play, and to suggest how the assign-
ment of singular cultural forms to larger substructural formations always oper-
ates at the cost of a certain blindness. Accordingly, my readings have attempted in
every case to gauge the chosen material along multiple lines of possibility: as, first,
historical expressions of the holomorph they at least partially instantiate and,
thus, as evidence for the longstanding presence of a discourse on China and the
modern human; as, second, nonidentical in their resemblance, that is, as expres-
sions of a set of variables modified by forms of historical and cultural difference,
as well as differences in attitude, medium, and genre, that demonstrated the
complexity of that holomorphic discourse over time; and as, third, expressions of
kinds of cultural interest having more or less nothing to do with the question of
China and the human at all, but which referred instead to, say, the relation
between text and image, between native and immigrant labor, or between medical
care and the suffering subject. None of these latter issues is unthinkable without
China, and in writing about them here I meant to indicate the limits of a reading
that would treat its examples as though they functioned exclusively to represent
the book’s major idea.
By the end of the chapter on Arthur Vinton, the historical relation between
economy and sympathy seemed to me to have been fairly well established, largely
on the evidence that emerged in the readings of Mason and Parker, in which the
Western apprehension of Chinese suffering occurred in such an intensely literal
relationship to problems of trade, of transnational labor, and of medical, reli-
gious, and market penetrations. At the same time, the entire question of exchange
as it emerged in those chapters created a burgeoning sense of the importance of
representation. A thematics of representation had appeared as early as the
theorization of the anecdote in the first chapter, but it had been subsumed in the
chapters on Mason and Vinton to the question of sympathy’s economic function.
By the time I arrived at Russell, however, I felt like the balance between sym-
pathy’s economic dimensions and its mimetic ones ought to be reversed, with the
result that the last two chapters on Russell and Bataille, and especially the
discussion of aesthetics and anesthesia, foregrounded the roles played by repre-
sentational exchange. In both cases, my emphasis was on the manner that
representationality, rather than functioning as an absent or prior idealization of
interpersonal exchange to which sympathy might then be compared, tended
instead to be articulated through acts of sympathy and suffering, as though the
ability to transfer certain kinds of human feeling were the test of any representa-
tion’s mimetic aptitude: the test, that is, of whether it counted as mimesis at all.30
Anyone wishing to think the relation between sympathy, pain and representa-
tion must contend, as I have throughout the book, with the almost nuclear
impact of Elaine Scarry’s 1985 publication of The Body in Pain. The immense
sweep of Scarry’s historical and geographical ambition, encapsulated in her
subtitle, “the making and unmaking of the world,” is fulfilled with particular
vigor in her fourth and final chapter, which moves from the discussion of
historically particular relations to suffering to a more philosophical treatment
of the nature of all of human creativity. All making, Scarry writes, responds to the
perception of pain: a chair, for instance, to the recognition that it hurts to sit on
the hard ground, Promethean fire to the fact that it hurts to be cold in winter,
postal services to the fact that it hurts to be alone, and so forth. All human
artifacts are the mimetic “projections” of the experience of pain, the products of
an initial recognition that something hurts, and the physical expression of an
attempt to ease that pain for oneself or for others.
From a series of small and largely material projections, Scarry ladders up the
entire scale of human creation, moving from chairs and fires to entire regimes of
comfort-creating or warmth-making artifacts, seeing how they can be idealized as
concepts (the idea of “the hearth,” for instance) that prompt renewed activity
designed to support or sustain them. So, as Scarry puts it, “the sense of protective
30
That sympathy and mimesis might be connected is an idea as old as Aristotle’s writings on
theatrical catharsis, though any comparison between Aristotle and the present would have to parse the
difference between the social function of catharsis in the Aristotelian theater and the more individu-
alistic sympathetic drive in contemporary accounts of the workings of text and image. Let us observe,
in any case, the difference between theories of mimesis oriented around affect and ones directed at
something like verisimilitude.
CLOSURES 267
unity sensorially available in a concrete shelter and in the lived patterns of family
life may be greatly extended in the concept of ‘polis’; and, in turn, the projective
act of apprehending and holding steadily in the mind the remote concept of
polis . . . may be assisted and relieved by the comparatively freestanding existence
of maps, colored squares of cloth, courthouses, and verbal pledges,” each of these
last the material and pseudo-sentient projections of the pain or difficulty of
remembering, and each enabling in its own way a further set of identifications
and projections that might lead to social transformation: hospitals, aqueducts,
and the like.31 Two and a half million years after the emergence of Homo habilis,
all this projection, reflection, idealization, and creation leads inexorably to the
world we have today, which is essentially the mimetic reflection of an entire
history of human suffering and of human attempts to relieve it.
Before discussing the implications of the mimetic theory that grounds Scarry’s
history of the species, I wish briefly to address the problem created by the
ontological sweep of the claim that places sympathy at the core of human making.
Generosity, Scarry writes at one point, is “embedded in the ontological status of
human beings as creators” (BP, 324; emphasis mine). How can we think the
ontological nature of human making (as grounded in the experience of pain
and the timeless nature of compassion) against the evidence that other claims
of the same sort can be located in a series of particular historical moments, and
thus against the clear Eurocentrism of the ontological claim as such? A serious
response cannot simply oppose historical evidence to philosophical argument: as
Gayatri Spivak so nicely puts it, in another context in which the difference
between history and philosophy is at stake, “it is not correct to think that, because
‘inalienable’ rights have been again and again violated, they do not exist.”32
Nonetheless, if we wish to assert the ontological generosity of all human making,
and if a major consequence of such an assertion is to tie sympathy inextricably to
representation (to make them, essentially, identical), we would do well to test that
intuition against the lived history of the planet and, thus, to recognize the degree
to which an argument like Scarry’s effectively reproduces the language of episte-
mic violence whose existence has been narrated in this text.
Considering the historical complicity of Enlightenment compassion with
violence does not mean that we invalidate its lessons or its claims. It requires
31
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), 322.
Further references in the text are cited as BP.
32
Gayatri Spivak (lecture, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif., May 8,
2007).
instead recognizing that the geographic limits of that compassion and its histori-
cal expressions are relevant to the realm of the idea. In this context, if we imagine
for a moment another way of looking at things, see making, for instance, as a way
of honoring God, or see pain as the necessary if unfairly distributed presence of
the worldness of the world, without returning each of these by way of metaphor
to a primary relation to suffering, then we can imagine a planet on which, as
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew quite seriously proposed throughout the
1990s, the suffering of any single human body were not the final referent of the
political, but merely one element among many having a right to accommodation
in the social system (others being family, justice, or order). The point is not that
that Lee is right, nor that one should respect whatever cultural differences one
finds, no matter how cruel or ignorant one finds them, but rather that the
encounter with genuine difference is by definition the encounter with the initially
incomprehensible, with the apparently cruel or the seemingly ignorant. The
challenge of cross-cultural understanding is not that of getting along with people
who like a different flavor of ice cream than you do but of getting along with
people who think your eating ice cream is obscene, or who don’t think that
putting ice cream in your mouth involves “eating” at all—in meeting forms of
difference, that is, that force one to reconsider one’s most normalized assump-
tions about the proper relation between self and self, world and world. The
project is, then, how to think the relevance of pain to the human condition
while remaining aware of the evidence that suggests that pain’s primary impor-
tance (and thus compassion’s) has to be taught and imposed, and has historically
been taught and imposed (even in the West) in collaboration with a series of other
events and effects, most broadly those involving the building and narrating of the
idea of modernity.
The completion of that task belongs to another book, for which this one will
have functioned as something like a preface. For now, to return to the explicitly
mimetic dimensions of Scarry’s universalizing claim about the nature of sympa-
thy, I wish to remark that for all the complexity Scarry attributes to the mimetic
force of creative making, all the astonishing diversity of coat and fire, polis and
map in the end comes down to a single representational imperative: you can
make anything you’d like, but what you make will in the final instance be a
representation of suffering. Such a model imposes on its mimetic objects a fairly
forceful version of the representational strategy known as “realism”: “though the
objects [of the world] are projected fictions of the responsibilities, responsiveness,
and reciprocating powers of sentience, they characteristically perform this
mimesis more successfully if not framed by their fictionality or surrounded by
CLOSURES 269
self-conscious issues of reality and unreality,” if, that is, they do not notice or
otherwise draw attention to their own status as fictions (BP, 325; emphasis mine).
In response to this relatively impoverished notion of the representational capa-
cities of the pain-centered object, I would say that my task here has been, first, to
demonstrate that quite often the elaborate making of a fiction is in fact precisely
where the mimetic labor lies (as in the case of Mason, or Parker, or the photog-
rapher of Chinese executions), and, second, to assert that any theory of sympa-
thetic mimesis that limits its representational functions to the range established
by a restricted Lukacsian realism will miss a great deal, since in its insistence on
representation’s final reference to the “realness” of suffering it will be unable to
imagine other kinds of mimetic motivations (of the type generated by, to use a
literary shorthand, modernism, the Romantic, or surrealism). A sense of the
world’s objects as mimetic expressions of the experience of pain can therefore be
expanded, this book has shown, to include a wide variety of representational
strategies. Part of my project’s aim has been to restore to these mimetic objects a
strong sense of their representational complexity, undermining the performance
of a certain realism by showcasing that realism’s reliance on representational
strategies, including elision, discontinuity, and paralepsis, and a series of formal
and generic concerns—about the evidentiary status of the image, about the
nature of allegory, or the representation of unoccupied perspectives—that con-
sistently foreground the very issues of reality and unreality that the texts and
images themselves seemed to want to pass over in silence.
This matters because if the mimetic exchange suggested by the transfer from
“reality” to “representation” belongs to the general field of exchange that gen-
erates the transfer of sympathy, it is not only because sympathy always responds
to the represented evidence of suffering, but because the process of sympathetic
exchange itself may be far more mimetically complex than we have imagined. If
sympathy is a model for mimesis, that is, and if mimesis can be shown to allow
for a series of complex representational strategies (genre, movement) or tactics
(metonymy, litotes), then any theory of sympathetic representationality that does
not itself allow for a similarly complex set of tactics and strategies will in fact be
undermining the fundamental insight of its initial recognition. The point is not
only that sympathetic exchange and representational exchange are “like” each
other (which they are), but that the set of mimetic strategies through which we
read representations should be turned to the reading of sympathies as well, partly
because it is the nature of sympathies to be complex and intertwined with history,
and partly because this kind of sustained attention to the making of sympathy will
tend to undermine the normalizing assumptions about its naturalness that make
it so hard to imagine the reason that someone else doesn’t feel about suffering the
way you do. The readings I have done of these mimetic objects ought therefore to
be understood, mutatis mutandis, also as readings of the sympathetic labor
whereby they generated (or dismissed, or rendered invisible) their identification
or disidentification with suffering, a labor that each time was no less complex and
self-referential than the more obviously textual or image-oriented work that
made it visible.
CLOSURES 271
capitalization of affect
Body Worlds
(complex term)
the modern, sympathy economic the primitive,

the human exchange the inhuman
Balzac, Greenblatt, the “coolie”;
Mason, Bataille, Vinton’s America;
Lu Xun representational indifference the historically
(positive deixis) unthematizable
exchange (= not sympathy)
(negative deixis)
(= not economic
exchange)
absence of style / a-style

Lam Qua’s portraits;
acupuncture anesthesia;
Edmund Scott
(neutral term)
Fig 7.3 The Greimasian Square, even so.

Index
acupuncture, 210–11, 218–19, 241–45, 271 Badiou, Alain, 86 n. 38

Agamben, 86 n. 37, 146 n. 25, 229 n. 39 Bal, Mieke, 219 n. 21
Alexander, William, 63–64, 79, 82–83, 89 Balzac, Honoré de, 4–6, 26, 28, 33, 95,
Alloula, Malek, 236 n. 56 262–63, 271
American Acupuncture Anesthesia Banfield, Anne, 177–85, 188, 200, 204
Study Group, the, 211 n. 7, 243 n. Banta, Martha, 258 n. 18
67–68 Brandon, Ruth, 16 n. 18
American Emigrant Company, 138 Barnes, Elizabeth, 6 n. 4
American Federation of Labor, the, Barthes, Roland, 27, 36, 109, 110–11, 207,
139–43, 145–46 235 n. 55, 261 n. 25
Améry, Jean, 52 n. 19 Bataille, Georges, 32, 220–21, 225–40,
Anderson, Perry, 33 n. 50, 138 n. 9 249, 251, 266
anecdote, the, xii, 30, 39–40, 42–43, 45, Baucom, Ian, 6 n. 4, 6 n. 6
47–53, 54 n. 22, 54–59, 65–66, 93 Bauer, Joanne R., 7 n. 7, 19, 19 n. 27–28,
anesthesia, 210–13, 215, 218–19, 223–24, 20 n. 29–30, 21 n. 31, 24 n. 38
229, 240–45 Becerra, Gaspar, 255
Anglicanism, liberal, 7 Bell, Daniel A., 7 n. 7, 19, 19 n. 27–28, 20
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 210, 213–18, n. 29–30, 21 n. 31, 24 n. 38
242 Bell, Lynda S., 20 n. 29
apes, evolved, 21, 155 n. 37 Bellamy, Edward, 151–53, 161–63, 171
Appiah, K. Anthony, 26 n. 41 Bender, John, 6 n. 6, 34 n. 53
Asad, Talal, 17–19, 31, 104–05, 129, 164 Bender, Thomas, 6 n. 4, 6 n. 6, 7 n. 7, 99
Asian Americans, 27 n. 42, 29, 153 n. 6, 217 n. 17
n. 36, 170 Benedict, Barbara, 7 n. 8
“Asian Values debate,” the, 19, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 165, 213–15, 225
n. 29–30, 21–25, 245 n. 30, 233
astronomy, 11 Berry, Michael, 220 n. 22, 220 n. 24
Austen, Jane, 7 Black, Dora, 191, 193
273
274 INDEX
Bloomsbury, 177–78, 181–82, 186, 196, 294 and immigration, See immigration,
Blue, Gregory, 16 n. 18, 67 n. 10, 73, 82, Chinese
220 n. 22, 227 n. 33–34 and labor, See labor, Chinese
Bodies . . . the Exhibition, 258, 259 n. 20–21 and modernity, See modernity, and
Body Worlds, 253–62, 271 China
Borel, Adrien, 234–35 as myth, 9, 31, 92
Borges, Jorge Luis, 70, 70 n. 12 and postcolonial studies, 10
Bourgon, Jérôme, 16 n. 18, 67 n. 10, 73, stereotypes of, 16, 27 n. 42, 46, 48, 62,
82, 220 n. 22, 227 n. 33–34 65, 70, 76, 77, 80, 88, 110, 123–24,
Bridgman, E. C., 99–100, 101 n. 13, 131, 138–39, 141, 144, 147, 151,
102–03, 120 n. 35, 133 154–55, 163, 168, 192, 195, 206, 248
British East India Company, 89, 96 and writing, See writing, Chinese
Broadie, Alexander, 7 n.7, 91 n. 47, 263 “Chineseness”, 26 n. 41, 28, 35, 40, 56, 82
Brook, Timothy, 16 n. 18, 67 n. 10, 73, n. 27, 164–66, 206, 223, 228, 259,
82, 220 n. 22, 227 n. 33–34 261–63
Brown, Bill, 185 n. 19, 233 n. 47, 233 n. 48 as barbarism, 8 n. 9
Brown, Wendy, 257 and suffering, 30 n. 49, 202–05, 247, 249
Bruhm, Steven, 78 n. 19, 214 n. 11 Chinese Exclusion Act, the, 139
Bryant, Marsha, 240 n. 60 Chow, Rey, 10 n. 12, 13, 90, 174 n. 2, 219
Buck, Pearl S., 207–11, 213–14, 218, 243 n. 21, 250 n. 5, 250 n. 6
Buck-Morss, Susan, 213–14, 223, 230, Christ, Jesus, 34 n. 53, 227, 246
238, 240 Clunas, Craig, 62 n. 2, 80–82, 84 n. 31,
Burri, René, 208 87 n. 40, 107–08 n. 23
Bush, Christopher, 13, 84 n. 32, 166 Colledge, T. R., 99–100, 101 n. 13,
n. 48, 203 n. 47, 228 n. 37, 236–37 102–03, 120 n. 35, 133
Confucianism, 19, 19 n. 28, 74, 77,
Cadava, Eduardo, 225 n. 30, 230 n. 41, 146 n. 25
231, 246 “coolie”, the, 136, 140–41, 146, 148–49,
California, 136, 139 151, 163–67, 170, 271
capitalism, 22–23, 165, 189, 214 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 11
Castells, Manuel, 146 n. 25 costumes, 60–92, 219
Castronovo, Russ, 262 n. 26 Cragg, Gerald, 7 n. 7
Cezanne, Paul, 180–81 Crane, R. S., 6 n. 5, 7 n. 7
Chan, Joseph, 19 n. 28 cruelty, 14, 15–17, 44, 92, 149, 193, 199,
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11 250, 252, 268
Cheadle, Mary Peterson, 175 n. 4
Cheah, Pheng, 22–23, 169 Daffron, Benjamin, 6 n. 4
Chen Chieh-Jen, 220 n. 22, 222 n. 24 Davis, Michael C., 20 n. 29
Cheng, Vincent, 30 n. 49 deconstruction,
China, practice of, xii, 12 n. 14, 15, 39, 57
as civilizational challenge to Europe, as theory of language, 38, 50, 57
9–11 Defoe, Daniel, 9 n. 10
exports from, 79–82, 88, 89–90, de Man, Paul, 60
93, 166 Derrida, Jacques, 50 n. 16, 174 n. 2, 199,
and human rights, See rights, human 229 n. 37
INDEX 275
Dirks, Nicholas B., 67–68 n. 11 Gompers, Samuel, 139 n. 10

Dirlik, Arif, 24 Goodman, Nelson, 124 n. 39
Doane, Mary Ann, 210 n. 5 Green, Judith, 185 n. 19
Donnelly, Ignatius, 150, 150 n. 29 Greenblatt, Stephen, 30, 36–59, 60, 93,
Donnelly, Jack, 19 n. 26, 24 n. 38 103, 105, 271
Dowdle, Michael, 20 n. 29 Gulick, Edward, 96 n. 1, 97 n. 4, 98 n. 5,
106 n. 20, 107 n. 22, 131 n. 46
Eagleton, Terry, 95 Gyory, Andrew, 138, 146 n. 25
“ecliptic”, the, 8–14, 15, 28 n. 47, 31, 35,
67, 252, 261–62 Haakonssen, Knud, 7 n. 7
Eco, Umberto, 216–17 Hall, Stuart, 58 n. 25
Edwards, Elizabeth, 232 Haltunnen, Karen, 17 n. 20, 17 n. 21
Eliot, T. S., 181, 186 Hampson, Fen, 19 n. 27
Eng, David L, 30 n. 49 Handke, Peter, 247–48, 253
Eperjesi, John, 143 n. 21 Hansen, Chad, 20 n. 29
Erickson, Jon, 185 n. 19 Hanson, Elizabeth, 44 n. 8
“example-effect”, the, 25–30, 27 n. 42, Hapgood, Hutchins, 205
35, 56, 206, 249, 265 Harrell, Stevan, 14–15 n. 16
execution, 219, 222–24, 233, 241, 250 Hart, Janice, 232
Haskell, Thomas L., 7 n. 7, 98,
Fabian, Johannes, 241, 241 n. 63 217 n. 17
“Family of Man” exhibit, the, 261 Hayles, N. Katherine, 233 n. 48, 258 n. 18
Fenster, Julie M., 126 n. 43, 213 n. 9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, 33,
Feuerbach, 141, 141 n. 16 170, 171 n. 53
Fichtelberg, Joesph, 6 n. 4 Heinrich, Larissa, 108 n. 24, 109 n. 26,
Fineman, Joel, 39–40, 55, 93 112 n. 28, 113 n. 29, 116 n. 32, 119, 121
Flaubert, Gustave, 7, 86 n. 36, 131, 141 n. 14
Fordyce, David, 7 n. 7 Hevia, James, 63 n. 4, 96 n. 2, 97 n. 3,
Foucault, Michel, 6 n. 6, 17 n. 20, 48 n. 224 n. 28
15, 67, 70 n. 12, 99 n. 6, 241 n. 62 Hilsdon, Anne-Marie, 20 n. 30
Frank, Andre Gunder, 10 n. 11, 89, historical criticism, 55, 58
89 n. 44 Hollywood, Amy, 226, 228
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 176–77 n. 5 Huang, Guiyou, 175 n. 4
Fry, Roger, 178, 180–81, 185 Huang, Yunte, 175 n. 4
Fukuyama, Francis, 171 n. 53 human, the, 12, 14, 21, 25, 91, 109, 118,
139, 171, 200, 203, 212, 224, 235, 254,
Gallop, Jane, 56, 56 n. 23 257, 265, 267, 271
George, Henry, 142 rights of, See rights, human
Gilman, Sander, 107 n. 21, 107 n. 22, 109 universality of, 21, 99–100, 130, 228,
n. 26, 113 n. 29, 115 n. 31, 117 n. 32, 257–62
131, 140 n. 14 Hume, David, 7, 7 n. 7
Gilroy, Paul, 58 n. 25 Hunt, Lynn, 20 n. 30, 128 n. 45, 217 n. 17
Ginzburg, Carlo, 5 Husserl, Edmund, 231
globalization, 10, 12, 18, 26, 165, 168–69, Hutcheson, Francis, 7, 7 n. 7
212, 262, 264 hyle, 231–34, 238–41, 244–45, 254
276 INDEX
ideogram, the, 84 mandarin, the, 5, 25, 27–28, 33–35, 64,

immigration, Chinese, 140, 144, 146, 95, 133, 205–06, 261–63
148–49, 159, 161, 171 Manson, Marsden, 150 n. 29
indifference, 5, 118, 132, 134, 149, 166, Mao, Douglas, 185 n. 19
189–95, 199–201, 206, 222–23, Marshall, David, 263
239, 271 Marx, Karl, 9–10, 33 n. 50, 138 n. 9, 170
Mason, George Henry, 61–88, 89,
Jameson, Fredric, 162 n. 44, 170 90–93, 95, 105, 107, 166, 205,
Joyce, James, 95, 182 n. 10, 186 208–09, 219, 227, 232, 249, 251,
Jung, Moon-Ho, 136, 137 n. 4, 138 265–66, 269, 271
McClintock, Anne, 219 n. 20, 241
Kant, Immanuel, 22, 23 n. 34, 33, 102, media, xii, 28, 59–60, 80, 86, 176, 209,
102 n. 15, 262 209 n. 4, 228, 233 n. 48, 236 n. 56,
Kern, Robert, 175, 175 n. 4, 186 n. 20 241–42, 257 n. 16
Klein, Christina, 234 n. 53 circulation of, 29, 73, 119, 159, 166,
Kleinman, Arthur, 104 n. 17, 104 n. 18 219–41, 252, 261
Ko, Dorothy, 30 n. 49 as substrate, 231, 233 n. 48, 234 n. 53,
Koshy, Susan, 22 n. 32, 24 n. 37 244, 263
Kracauer, Siegfried, 230–31 See also Lam Qua
See also photography
labor, Chinese, 136–42, 147, 151, 155, 161, See also postcards
163, 167 See also Pu Qua
Lam Qua, 105–116, 119, 124–25, 130, 133, medicine, 103
135, 271 Chinese, 101, 113
Lamb, Jonathan, 237, 246 and modernity, 212
Laqueur, Thomas, 128 n. 45, 217 n. 17 Western, 98–101, 117, 119, 243
Laurence, Patricia, 177, 182–85, 188, 204 Mendes, Errol, 19 n. 27
Lee Kuan Yew, 20 n. 28, 23, 268 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 172
Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 250 n. 5 “micro-genre”, 31, 54, 261
Lee, Robert, 16 n. 18, 27 n. 42, 140 n. 13, Miller, William, 61, 83 n. 29
150 n. 30, 151 n. 31 Mirbeau, Octave, 16, 17–18, 237 n. 57
Leibniz, Gottfried, 84, 174 n. 2 Mitchell, S. Weir, 100, 212
Lenard, Mary, 6 n. 4 Mitchell, W.J.T., 84 n. 33, 85 n. 35, 207,
Liu, Joyce C. H., 220 n. 22 209 n. 3–4, 236 n. 56, 253 n. 12
Liu, Lydia, 48, 195, 252 modernism, literary, xi–xiii, 174–76,
Lohman, Carl, 172–73 176 n. 5, 177–86, 195–96, 201–04, 206
Lowell, Amy, 175 modernist studies, xii, 177–78, 185–87, 204
Lu Gwei-Djen, 242, 243 n. 68 modernity, xii, 18, 25, 93, 146, 162,
Lu Xun, 249–53, 271 166–71, 193, 195, 201, 214, 229, 235,
Lye, Colleen, 140, 168–69 241, 245, 269, 271
Lyotard, Jean-François, xi, 201 n. 43 and China, 9, 12, 211, 218, 242, 250–52
and labor, 141
Ma, Sheng-Mei, 16 n. 18, 150 n. 30 and medicine, 212
Macartney, Lord George, 89, 95, 251 and rights discourse, 23, see also
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 19 rights, human
INDEX 277
and sympathy, 8, 12, 15 Ptolemy, 11, 225

Western idea of, 8–10, 20 Pu Qua, 68, 72, 76, 79, 81,-85, 86, 107,
Molot, Maureen, 19 n. 27 109, 208, 232
Monk, Ray, 189, 191 n. 30 punishment, 66–67, 68–72, 74–75,
Moore, G.E., 178 77–78, 88, 90, 93, 206, 227
morality, 3, 5, 6, 91, 98, 102
Morris, David, 100 n. 11, 104 n. 17, 212 n. 8 Qian, Zhaoming, 175, 184 n. 18
Morris, Norval, 6 n. 6 Qianlong (Emperor), 89, 96
Qing Dynasty, 73, 89, 96, 182, 219, 234
Nathan, Andrew, 14–15, 20 n. 29
Needham, Joseph, 242, 243 n. 68 Rabinbach, Anson, 258 n. 18
Nelson, Dana D., 6 n. 4 Rachman, Stephen, 97–98 n. 4, 107 n.
New Historicism, xii, 39–40 see also 22, 108 n. 24, 115–16, 116 n. 32, 120
historical criticism n. 35, 133 n. 48
North, Michael, 186 n. 20 Rawls, John, 19, 19 n. 28
Riboud, Marc, 210, 213, 243
Opium Wars, the, 96, 105 rights, human, xi, 18–25, 90, 94, 206,
opium, 96, 190 n. 28 258–59
Orientalism, 8–9, 8 n. 9, 182, 193–94, 204 Riskin, Jessica , 258 n. 18
Othman, Norani, 21 n. 30 Rooney, Ellen, 36
Rothman, David J., 6 n. 6
Pai, Shin Yu, 246 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4–5, 5 n. 3
pain, 17–18, 44–47, 51–53, 71, 78, 93, 100, Rudner, Martin, 19 n. 27
102–05, 107, 109, 114, 119–33, 139, Russell, Bertrand, 31, 44, 48, 178–79,
141, 149, 167, 171, 176, 193–201, 203 181–84, 188–201, 204–06, 223–24,
n. 46, 212, 222, 224, 226, 229, 251–52, 266
238–40, 243–45, 247, 266–68
Parker, Peter, 45, 97–134, 137, 166, 172, sadism, 194, 225
249, 265, 269 Said, Edward, 8 n. 9, 204
patriots, self-aggrandizing delusions of, 14 Samuels, Shirley, 6 n. 4
Peleg, Ilan, 20 n. 29 Sánchez, Gonzalo, 6 n. 4
perception, 178–80, 203, 206, 214–15, 239 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 229 n. 38
Pernick, Martin, 101 n. 12, 104 n. 17, 212 Saussy, Haun, 5 n. 3, 13, 13 n. 14, 84 n. 32,
n. 8, 213 n. 9, 243 n. 70 96 n. 2, 136 n. 2, 151 n. 30, 174 n. 2,
Peters, Edward, 6 n. 6, 44 n. 8, 67 n. 10 183 n. 15, 195, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 8, 252
Pfaelzer, Jean, 153, 153 n. 36 Saxton, Alexander, 137 n. 4, 140 n. 12,
phenomenology, 8, 47, 144, 231 150 n. 29
photography, 207–11, 213–15, 217–19, Scarry, Elaine, 45, 51–52, 55, 121–22, 130,
223–25, 228–34, 237–40, 244 197, 212, 266–69
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 9, 89 n. 43 Schwartz, Sanford, 185 n. 19
Porter, David, 64–65 n. 7, 79 n. 20 Scott, Edmund, 36–59, 65, 249, 271
postcards, 219–25, 229, 236 n. 56, 238, Scott, Joan W., 57–58
241–42, 245 Second World Conference on Human
poststructuralism, 39, 55 Rights, the, 20 n. 29, 22
Pound, Ezra, 150 n. 30, 174, 181, 186 n. 21 Seltzer, Mark, 255, 257, 261
278 INDEX
Sen, Amartya, 24 See also punishment

Shakespeare, William, 73–74 Tu Wei-ming, 24 n. 39, 19–20 n. 28
Shiel, M. P., 150, 150 n. 30 tumors, 105–119, 126–27, 140, 210
Shih, Shu-mei, 13, 60, 182 n. 13, 192 n. 31 Turner, James, 6 n. 6, 132 n. 47
slavery, 136–37, 155
Smith, Adam, xi, 3–4, 6, 26, 27–28, 35, Vainker, Shelagh, 62 n. 2, 82 n. 27, 84 n. 29
90–91, 200, 263 Vesalius, Andreas, 253
Smith, Arthur, 48, 144–47, 168, 195, 251 Vescey, George, 16 n. 18
Sontag, Susan, 210, 213–15, 217–19, 228, Vinton, Arthur, 149–67, 170–71, 265–66,
230, 243–44 271
souvenir, the, 18 n. 24, 64, 64 n. 6, 107, Volkman, Toby Alice, 30 n. 49
234–36, 236 n. 56, 239–40
Soviet Union, the, 212, 217 n. 15 Waley-Cohen, Joanna, 89 n. 44, 148 n. 27
Spence, Jonathan, 15 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 54 n. 22, 124 n. 39
Spivak, Gayatri, 86, 229 n. 37, 267 Wang Ping, 30 n. 49
Steichen, Edward, 261 Wang, David Der-wei, 15 n. 16, 196 n. 35,
Stein, Gertrude, 173–75, 205–06 251 n. 7
Stephen, Leslie, 178 Weber, Max, 9, 99 n. 6
stereotypes, See China, stereotypes of Wegner, Philip E., 151 n. 32, 153 n. 36
Stern, Megan, 254 West, Robin, 20 n. 30
Stewart, Susan, 18 n. 24, 64 n. 6, 234, Whitney, James, 139, 141, 147
240 n. 59 Wilde, Oscar, 135
structuralist desire, the implacable Williams, R. John, 150 n. 30, 153 n. 36
force of, 32, 271 Williams, Raymond, 95, 162, 162 n. 45
suffering, xi–xiii, 8, 15 n. 17, 16–18, 21, Winternitz, Milton C., 172–75
29, 31–32, 44–45, 50, 56–57, 99– Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 178, 196–97,
100, 102–107, 139, 163, 193, 222–23, 199–200
226, 228, 247–48, 251, 263, Woloch, Alex, 158 n. 40
269–70, See also pain Woolf, Virginia, 177, 179–86, 194 n. 33,
surgery, modern, 213–14, 242, 244 200, 201–03, 206
sympaesthetics, 263–270 writing, Chinese, 173–75, 184, 195–96
sympathy, xi–xiii, 6, 8, 12–13, 15, 17, 25, 53, Wu, Harry, 16 n. 18
56, 60, 77–78, 87–88, 90–95, 102–03, Wu, William F., 149 n. 28,
125, 131, 147, 193, 201, 209, 237, 239, 150 n. 30
248, 250, 255, 261, 263–66, 268, 271
and economic exchange, 97–99, 271 Yang Hsien-yi, 250 n. 5
Yang Kuei, 216
Tatsuo, Inoue, 21 n. 31 Yang, Gladys, 250 n. 5
Taylor, Charles 7, 7 n. 7 Yao, Steve, 13, 151 n. 30, 175,
Tiananmen Square, 14, 208–09 186 n. 20
Todd, Janet, 7 n. 8 Yasuaki, Onuma, 19 n. 28
Torgovnick, Mariana, 186 n. 20 Yu, Henry, 145 n. 23
torture, 16, 41–42, 45–47, 49–51, 55, 59, 67,
150, 189, 193–94, 219, 221, 225–26, Zhang Longxi, 70 n. 12, 84 n. 32,
230, 241, 249 183 n. 15

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Modernist Literature & Culture

The Hypothetical Mandarin

Copyright 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

International Institute, in a program whose director, Françoise Lionnet, serves the

A version of chapter 3 appeared in Representations 99 (summer 2007) as “Chinese

Series Editors’ Foreword xi

Introduction: The Hypothetical Mandarin 3

Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Mark Wollaeger

1. The Mandarin (First Appearance)

“Have you read Rousseau?”

heart of the sympathetic transformation of human life that founded modernity’s

reform, an “immense cultural revolution” involving what Charles Taylor has

2. The Chinese Ecliptic

American neo-conservatives). I do this work, however, not to produce this

series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve,” then

necessary features of an articulation of the nature of human sympathy from the

ﬁgures (though necessarily incompletely) the general awkwardness of the Chinese

representation—together through the epistemological aperture of Russell’s

6. The Mandarin (Return)

By their appearance the plasticized corpses establish an anthropomorphic coun-

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reﬂections on Photography

Wherefore, because of his sullenness, I thought I would burn him now a

These lines present Greenblatt with an interpretive dilemma. “What are we to

“fact” of endurance, which we might initially have imagined as a referential

such. To say this is not, I think, to engage in poststructuralist play about

2. Pain’s Language of Agency

The shockingly luminous quality of the events Scott describes—reading the

Greenblatt for long, it nonetheless indicates his awareness of the potential

convey something of the felt-experience of pain to someone outside the

• Thematic line number one: The anecdote’s recounting of an episode of

anti-empiricists even as it reinstates a foundational ground” for their work.24

1. Costumes and Customs

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Miller, a London

By presenting to the eye a series of judiciously selected and well executed

Alexander’s The Costume of China, published in 1805.3 Like Mason, Alexander

experience as a traveler in China. In portraits of speciﬁc individuals, like the one

Returning to the typological argument of Mason’s books, one might begin to

historical moment—it also claims to illustrate the general principle organized by

to the historical divergence between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European

Punishments as the anomalous expression of British ethnography, however, in

Punishments opens with a plate titled “A Culprit Before a Magistrate,” repro-

Various writers have mentioned other punishments, in addition to those

A person mounted on a toll, and concealed as far as the ankles with a

Fig 2.2 George Henry

Fig 2.3 George Henry

Considering the typological work done by “A Lame Beggar” in the context of

3. English Writing, “Chinese” Pictures

(CEW, 11), it is because the intersection between a set of representational demands

European mercantilism, but actually testify—as does Mason’s career as a soldier in

4. The Compassion Trade

It remains then to explain the particular eventfulness of the narrative–logical

readers might be thought of as a gesture inside an international economy of

Smith would go on to publish the great critique of British mercantilism in his

—James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.

I closed the previous chapter by suggesting that the sympathetic exchange

treatment of human beings,” including theories of universal human rights, of the

2. Face, Tumor, Style

and value of pain (the discovery of chemical anesthetics, for instance) to

3. The Lam Qua Portraits